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Tom Reifenberg
Tom Reifenberg

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Hacktoberfest: So Much More Than a Free T-Shirt & Planting Trees

An Introduction

I'm Tom Reifenberg, a recent coding bootcamp graduate shifting careers to software development from landscape architecture. Joining Hacktoberfest has been an excellent opportunity to hone my new skills, search Github for cool projects, and lend a hand with some code tweaks to make everything run a bit smoother.

Progress

I'm thrilled to say I've accomplished the four pull requests needed to succeed, look at that victorious picture of a grooving parrot, and eagerly await the arrival of a slick looking shirt celebrating the event!

I have a few bonus pulls (and quite a few that fell outside of the Hacktoberfest tags), but I'm still planning on getting a few more bonus contributions to have more fun with the open source community.

Contributions

There were some nifty projects to help improve; a few were basic, like an introductory project where everyone contributes inspiring codes to a database, but others dive a bit deeper; for example, I'm in the process of helping build a stock price checker that links up to NASDAQ's database.

Reflections

Hacktoberfest has been a blast! I saw in the first few days that there was a rush toward spammy contributions, but it's so great to see how the event organizers reshaped the fest around project maintainers; instead of having thousands of people spamming every open source project, it's so smart to have maintainers tag repos in support of Hacktoberfest.

I'm looking forward to participating again next year! It will be interested to see how much my coding skills have grown between now and then, plus I hope to have a few projects available for everyone to enhance.

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