DEV Community

Cover image for Hactoberfest stories
Augustas Verbickas
Augustas Verbickas

Posted on

Hactoberfest stories

Background

I am digging deeper into the DevOps world, exploring open-source software, and willing to improve it. I have made contributions to open-source from time to time, and found that open-source communities are a great way to share knowledge and learn from each other.
It's great that everyone can find something for himself - it doesn't matter if you have years of experience or are just starting.

Contributions

The first two contributions were to the Mattermost project. I love the idea of having an open-source slack messenger alternative.
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-plugin-skype4business/pull/72
and
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-plugin-mscalendar/pull/196
I knew how to integrate Golangcilint into the CI pipeline, but don’t have as much experience fixing linter issues. A person from Mattermost helped to solve those. Also if something was not clear for me, I wrote them directly.
After those pull requests, I started to search where else I could contribute. On dev.to I found a thread where @sygmei https://dev.to/sygmei/comment/15ggm asked for help with Improving the CI/CD pipeline of ÖbEngine. I chose this project because I know how to operate Azure DevOps pipeline. I made a build matrix for Ubuntu 3 versions, macOS, windows so it could build at the same time.
My 4th pull request was for the spinnaker hackathon https://github.com/spinnaker-hackathon/gardening. Spinnaker is a massive CI/CD tool created by Netflix that you cano operate on Kubernetes, through operators, and use to deploy software to different cloud providers and environments such as Kubernetes. They are organizing a hackathon that I am participating in. I like the idea that anyone could participate because there are different sections:

  • Documentation
  • Video creating
  • Twitch about what you do in the spinnaker.
  • Video transcripts.

Reflections

Hacktoberfest, in general, made a very big impact on me as an Engineer. I started to participate in 2017.

I didn't know how to start to contribute, and started slowly contributing by updating and adding new things to documentation. Tips and encouragement that people gave me when I was getting started motivated me so much. This year I am happy that 3 pull requests were made because I am capable of making a serious impact to open source projects!

Recommendations

Anyone who is hesitating that they can't make a change - YES YOU CAN! Every reason is good to move, but curiosity is always the best one!

Top comments (0)