by Isaac Okoro
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. DigitalOcean hosts Hacktoberfest to enable people to give back to the community and contribute to open-source projects. It doesn't matter if you are a beginner or a senior in the business; Hacktoberfest is open to all. One unique thing about Hacktoberfest is that it is a fun competition whereby the first 40,000 people to participate either get an official Hacktoberfest T-shirt or a tree planted in their name. cool right
What about the rest of the people who participated but weren't in the lucky 40,000? Did they waste their time and resources? Well, this article will cover why you should participate in Hacktoberfest even though you might not be among the selected 40,000. Specifically, we will cover how participating in Hacktoberfest will help you improve your skills.
What are Skills?
Before getting into how Hacktoberfest can improve your skills, it would be nice to know what skills are. According to Wikipedia :
A skill is the learned ability to perform an action with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both.
Skills are generally divided into two categories: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are skills gained through training and experience. They can be taught and can easily be proven. An example is your ability to code; you either know it or don't. Can you learn it? Yes. Can it be proven? Yes
Soft skills are attributes that can influence the ability of a person to get the job done. Soft skills can also be known as a person's emotional intelligence.
Now that we understand what skills are, let's look at how taking part in Hacktoberfest can improve them.
Improving skills with Hacktoberfest
Nothing improves your skills quite as much as real-world experiences. Learning skills like quality assurance testing, software development, or technical writing is a good goal, but real-world experience makes you stand out. An issue arises: you need real-world experience to stand out, but how do you get that experience? This is where Hactorberfest comes in.
Hacktoberfest encourages contributions to open-source projects. With Hacktoberfest, anyone can contribute to varied and different projects while having little to no experience. You get to work on real-life projects, grow as an individual, and network with people.
One common question people ask is, do I need to be able to code before I can take part in Hacktoberfest? Well, the beauty of Hacktoberfest is that you do not need to have coding skills before you can contribute. You can contribute to projects by testing and reviewing them, documentation, copywriting, and many other things essential to a project's growth.
This means that you can contribute to these projects in different ways and improve whatever skills you have while gaining real-world experiences with them. You can also choose to add more skills while contributing.
For beginners, participating in Hacktoberfest will improve their knowledge of Git and GitHub. Contributing to Hacktoberfest requires knowledge of how to interact with repositories, how to use Git commands, create pull requests, and so on.
Another way to improve your skills in Hacktoberfest is through constructive criticism. At Hacktoberfest, the maintainers for most projects are likely to be seniors. This means that you can get input and more experience from the seniors and improve your skills in whichever project you are contributing to.
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Added incentives to take part in Hacktoberfest
If having a tree planted in your name and improving your skills aren't enough reasons for you to take part in Hacktoberfest, the following added perks might change your mind:
- You can add your accepted contributions to your resume and also use that as bragging rights.
- You collaborate with other people and learn from them
- You hear criticism and opinions, which help you grow
- You get consistent practice
- You have a wonderful opportunity to be among the open-source community
- And, finally, taking part in Hacktoberfest is loads of fun!
Conclusion
This article looked at some reasons why taking part in Hacktoberfest can help you improve your skills. Happy Hacktoberfest!
A TIP FROM THE EDITOR: Hacktoberfest can help in more ways, as our Leveraging The Hacktoberfest Community For Your Tech Career and Opportunities Hidden Within Contributing To Open Source articles explain.
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