We all know October is the spooky month. What's scarier than programmer's block, or stagnation?
Hacktoberfest was one of the most rewarding events of my post-bootcamp journey, and the solution to this problem for me. I found out about it the last week of September from the Flatiron School career services emails, and immediately signed up. It really came at the right time. I mean, I'm biased in favor of anything October related because it's my birthday month, but also I was feeling a bit stagnant in my personal projects.
Software engineering is obviously not an individual sport. One of the most important aspects of any good bootcamp or 4-year program is collaboration -- from issues such as version control to the soft skills of leadership and accepting feedback. After you graduate, that structure is gone, but these skills are invaluable to maintain for your career and personal development. So I felt tired of simply working on my personal projects, and was ready to jump into the field of open-source collaboration.
For a beginner, open-source collaboration can be somewhat daunting. There thousands of open-source projects, and many are rarely updated or poorly maintained, with sad, lonely pull requests lying fallow for months. I've been overwhelmed when I was more of a beginner. That's why Hacktoberfest was such a valuable resource. I spent a lot of time in the event's Discord server, where Github maintainers posted links to their projects that needed help. Some were in my wheelhouse (React, Javascript) and some weren't -- but I still checked out the ones that sounded interesting or active regardless of language.
I had some TypeScript knowledge before this project, but looking at codebases that used TypeScript really helped me see how the language was implemented and understand the benefits that its evangelists talked about. Now I feel like I have the confidence to use it for any larger scale personal project I take on.
As someone who still has not gotten my first software engineering role, working on open-source projects is probably the closest I've gotten. It teaches you all the skills I've mentioned, plus the idiosyncrasies and rules of each individual project. I also believe strongly in the ethos and values of the open-source world, and just being a tiny part of it felt meaningful.
I highly recommend the Hackathon experience to any open-source beginner, even if you're like me and missed out on the free T-shirts.
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