DEV Community

Cover image for A reflection on my Hacktoberfest experience
pyerie
pyerie

Posted on

1 1 2 2 2

A reflection on my Hacktoberfest experience

This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience

Hello there! This post is a reflection on my Hacktoberfest participation this year. It also turned out to be my first time participating in Hacktoberfest and was a great opportunity to learn more about open-source.

What's Hacktoberfest and how I found out about it?

I was scrolling through DEV community posts when I learned about Hacktoberfest. I was (and am) hungry for competitions and events, hence, this wasn't something I could pass. Hacktoberfest is a month-long event to celebrate open-source devs and to learn to be one of them. It's a great opportunity to learn and refine programming, problem-solving and social skills.

Signing up and choosing the right repo

I immediately signed up for the event but was having difficulty choosing the repositories to contribute. Most of the online repositories dealt with tech I was not proficient with. Looking through a few GitHub issues made me realize that I wouldn't be able to contribute with my current level of knowledge. This made me realize that programming tends to be a skill that requires constant change and learning. I wanted to contribute to a repo with lots of opportunities to code. I browsed through GitHub and found lots of repos that allow contributors to add their programs/codes which could help newbies and other programmers learn. I decided to contribute to AI-Octofusion and A-Z Python programs. These two awesome repos created by Techiral(shoutout to him!) would later go on to accept my very first PRs!

The contribution

I started contributing programs in the hope that they would be useful to someone, somewhere, sometime. My contributions included some of the programs that I put a lot of effort into. It's important to realize that developers use open source to learn new things and help them in their journey. I felt I had the opportunity to give back to society through this event. Throughout the month, I made 11 contributions, out of which 5 were merged. 2 of those contributions are yet to be accepted by the Hacktoberfest team(will be accepted 2 days from the time of writing).

Key takeaways

Looking back, I feel truly satisfied and accomplished. Collaborating with other developers was something I had never done before. Discovering the open-source community and being able to contribute to it was a real delight.

In the (not-so-distant) future, I want to contribute to many more open-source projects. I wish to upskill myself and make a greater impact.

An image of @pyerie's Holopin badges, which is a link to view their full Holopin profile

My Holopin badge







Tell me what you did during Hacktoberfest in the comments!

AWS Q Developer image

Your AI Code Assistant

Automate your code reviews. Catch bugs before your coworkers. Fix security issues in your code. Built to handle large projects, Amazon Q Developer works alongside you from idea to production code.

Get started free in your IDE

Top comments (0)

Billboard image

Create up to 10 Postgres Databases on Neon's free plan.

If you're starting a new project, Neon has got your databases covered. No credit cards. No trials. No getting in your way.

Try Neon for Free →

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay