by Uma Victor
The importance of community is often overlooked at times. A Community is a fundamental part of a developer's tech career. This article will briefly discuss how the Hacktoberfest community is a fantastic place to build a long-lasting community and leverage its opportunities.
What is Hacktoberfest
Hacktoberbest is a month-long celebration of open source that happens every October. This month-long celebration is for all techies, with many open-source projects and repositories to contribute.
Contributors are not just limited to coding projects. Still, they are also allowed to contribute to other areas in tech like design, writing, mentoring, organizing, etc.
Hacktoberfest 2022 has begun this year, and there is so much you can do. From joining in-person or virtual events and working on projects as a team to meeting lifelong friends and joining engaging communities, you can use it to leverage your tech career.
It’s not just about code
In the past, some people got the idea of the Hacktoberfest event being solely for coders or programmers or the only project to contribute to coding projects. Still, that's not true, and Hacktoberfest 2022 has helped clear the air on that front.
There is a lot you can do and contribute to this year's Hacktoberfest. You can see a lot going on by checking out the home page.
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Tips when participating
In this section, I'll share some tips that helped me contribute to this year's Hacktoberfest.
- Be confident: Forget about your imposter syndrome and fear of not being enough or knowing everything and just contribute. It's so easy to give up and fall back into your shell. Just make a move by commenting on an issue, reaching out to the project's maintainer, or even organizing an in-person or virtual event and participating.
- Avoid spamming: Avoid spamming or low-quality contributions just for the swag. People are used to doing this just so they can get their Hacktoberfest swag, creating a lot of spam and issues for open-source maintainers. Be better!
- Be polite: If you're leveraging the Hacktoberfest community for your tech career, you'll need to be polite to your fellow contributors and the maintainers of the project you want to contribute to or are contributing to. Keep this in mind, as they are also humans like you.
- Do more: Remember you need to have four pull/merge requests accepted between October 1 and October 31 to complete Hacktoberfest, so try to do more than four because there is a possibility, not all your contributions will be merged, so try to be on the safe side by doing more.
I hope these tips are of help to you as you participate.
Leveraging Hacktoberfest communities
Time to socialize! Suppose you're an introvert like I am. In that case, it can be comforting doing whatever you're doing alone, minding your business and nobody poke nosing at your work. While nothing is wrong with this, it can hinder your growth in the tech space; in this year's Hacktoberfest event, you should try as much as possible to leave your mental comfort zone and make new friends along the way as you contribute.
In this section, I'll talk about how you can leverage the Hacktoberfest community for your tech career and where to connect with people.
- First, you join all the Hacktoberfest channels/socials like discord and Reddit. Follow all the Hacktoberfest social media accounts like Twitter and try to be interactive. On Hacktoberfest Reddit, you can ask any question you want, make cry for help or even ask to join a team to contribute to a project.
Another way is to create your own community or team of contributors. By doing so, you are developing not just some leadership skills but, in the process, finishing your contributions much more quickly, making one or two friends and opening yourself up for opportunities.
With the permission of the maintainer of the project you contributed to, you can add the project to your portfolio as part of open source projects you have contributed to, highlighting what problems you were able to solve or help solve, then add it to your CV/portfolio, as open source contributions are one of the things that make a candidate stand out.
Conclusion
Finally! Happy I could share some knowledge on leveraging the Hacktoberfest community for your tech career. You can reach out to me on Twitter if you have further questions.
A TIP FROM THE EDITOR: Taking part of Hacktoberfest will also help in other ways, as detailed in Opportunities Hidden Within Contributing To Open Source.
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