Field Notes: Hacktoberfest 2025, Week 3

#hacktoberfest #ai #git #opensource

Hacktoberfest: Open Source Reflections

We crossed over the halfway point of Hacktoberfest 2025 and here is what happened in my little corner of the open source world. In this series we overview some stats for contributions I received and made over this month. This week, like the last, I mostly focused on GitFichas due to limited availability, but I also implemented some new features on my blog so let’s go into the contributions.

GitFichas

Like always, third week of Hacktoberfest symbolizes the big “slow down”, where the volume from contributions from the first few weeks dip after many folks complete their 4 or 6 pull requests. So after the high from last week, this week we had 30 pull requests:

23 PRs by the community
- 17 merged
- 5 closed
- 1 open

Interestingly enough I tried having copilot draft a PR and it actually, did a good job. I also merged 6 PRs myself which were 2 for documentation, 2 for corrections, and 2 for improvements.

The most exciting part for the week for me at least, was that on October 15th we reached the mark of over 100 issues closed. Which marks the milestone of more issues closed than open for GitFichas. 🎉

I also worked on improving descriptions for some issues that were open a long time ago.

As far as inviting people to contributing to your project, it is fundamental that you have both good descriptions and good titles since in the list of issues every contributor sees mostly the titles and tags. I did some automating to help make this easier on me and help me with maintenance tasks but I’ll write about that in a separate post later. 👀

Still on the issues subject this is the burn up chart since September 1st there’s still a gap but the trend is clear: the opening of issues is slowing down, and the closing of them is bridging the gap.

One final thing: someone decided to implement a search bar on GitFichas, there wasn’t an issue for this but it is something I definitely thought about having on the website.

A search function is not a tiny thing, especially if you don’t have a database for indexing the content. Nonetheless someone implemented it and I do believe it will help others find cards more easily! So another big win of open source! 🎉

The blog

On the blog side, I worked on three main things:

Series of posts
Subtitles for posts
New covers

Let’s dive in.

Series in a blog

Two weeks ago I implemented a series widget so anyone reading the posts can quickly jump to other posts in the same collection much like the “Related Articles” or “Recent Articles” widgets I already have.

Until Saturday it was impossible to link to a series, so I set on to fix that and create a way to link to a series so I could refer to series without linking out to an specific blog post.

To get series pages, I could think of a few ways to implement the behaviour:

Separate series into collections : I’ve created collections before, but in this case collections is not a great solution as it would separate the posts away from the rest of posts;
Manually create a page for each series : not scalable, that would create a bunch of other files for me to maintain;
Plugins : hear me out, plugins felt like the right way to go given the fact that I could write a ruby script to automatically generate pages but you can’t use custom plugins on GitHub Pages.

After some consideration, and talking to Copilot, I felt confident that writing a custom plugin was the way to go but since my blog was served through GitHub Pages I needed to find a different way to deploy the blog, and I was not about to commit the built site to GitHub.

Since I already use Netlify to preview the pull requests for both the blog and GitFichas, it felt like a natural step to migrate production deployment to Netlify as well. So I’d like to inform you all ladies and gentlemen, that I graduated from serving the production site from GitHub Pages to Netlify. I feel so much like a grown up dev. 🤣

With Copilot’s help I implemented the plugin and successfully migrated prod to Netlify, I’ll probably write a post on this later.

Here are some of the series:

Git Pro Tips: All about Git covering: conflicts, branches, rebase, and GitHub workflows.
Hacktoberfest 2025 Weekly: Weekly updates about Hacktoberfest 2025 on GitFichas and other projects.
MCP Mastery: All you need to know about Model Context Protocol (MCP).

These and all others are available in the series page.

Subtitles for posts

Another thing I always wanted to do was to have subtitles on some posts. This weekend I figured out it was time, and so after some Liquid magic and some CSS adjustments I’m happy to inform that I can now have posts with title and subtitles.

Just in time too for my fairy tale post.

New covers

If you are asking yourself “what fairy tale post?” well I also started to get a bit annoyed at the fact the covers in the blog were too repetitive lately since the last 14 posts had all the same cover.

So it was time to create a few more covers and put them to good use, I tell the story of it here in this other post, which I strongly encourage you to read because it is in the form of a fairy tale, but here’s the TL;DR: I noticed the repeated covers, opened an issue, and had copilot do the code adjustments.