This year's Hacktoberfest meetup in Singapore was a great success! We had roughly 50++ attendees showing up that we could barely fit in our petit office. I had the honour of being an emcee for the meetup.
Special thanks to Zenika and JuniorDevSG for making it happen. As well as Hacktoberfest sponsors for the cool T-shirts, swags and stickers!
We were joined by 3 brilliant speakers from the community that we had the honour of hosting: Jean-Philippe Baconnais, Julien Dubois and Aishwarya Elango. Jean Philippe is a recognised GitLab contributor known as a GitLab hero and currently works as a technical director for Zenika, Julien Dubois is the creator of opensource project JHipster and currently works as a principal manager for GitHub, Aishwarya Elango is a aommunity & programs lead at WomenDevSG
and currently works as a geospatial software engineer. The event was posted on Major League Hacking.
Jean-Philippe delivered an inspiring talk on his journey as an opensource translations contributor and to becoming a recognised GitLab hero. He talked about the pros and cons of contributing to opensource. And how he went from not wanting to contributing to opensource, to accidental contributions and finally a recognised opensource contributor. He also talked about how in the age of AI, there has been a rise of AI merge requests and how they might be damaging. He mentioned that AI is a useful tool but people might abuse it to flood opensource maintainers and create a lot of noise. At the same time, he would welcome meaningful AI merge requests.
As there were a bombardment of questions regarding AI in the age of opensource, Julien Dubois continued by engaging the audience on this topic. He talked about how JHipster uses the money donated to reward resolutions to certain GitHub issues on the project. This paid out monetary rewards to opensource contributors who would ensure that their quality of contribution is high. It motivates and helps keep the community going. Even if an AI is used as a tool for opensource contribution, the author of the Pull Request would have to ensure that it is sufficiently vetted as there is a strong incentive (monetary reward) to do so. Later, he talked about how he is using agents to work in parallel through GitHub co-pilot and how the parallel agents could work together (multi-player). He demonstrated how he is applying his workflows of writing crucial detail specifications to drive his agents. He used the day time to do planning, code review and write out specifications and then let his AI agents run during the night. He ensured that his specifications are very detailed so that the AI agents, even if they have a question, would be able to find the answers within the specifications and documentations.
For our last talk, Aishwarya Elango talked about her opensource contributor experience and WomenDevSG. From architecture of the project and the things to do as an opensource project maintainer. She talked about how the project is made to be easy to setup so that contributors can set it up easily and test their changes locally. The project uses AI extensively and drives it through detailed specifications through Open Spec. Not only is AI used for coding, it was also using for code reviews. However, the author contributor still hold responsibility and accountability for the code generated by AI. She has also created "good first" issues for potential contributors to engage with and help them with their first contributions. This talk encourages everyone to not be afraid of contributing to opensource.
Thereafter, we had our open spaces where attendees broke out into groups to discuss about various topics regarding opensource.
And we also distributed Hacktoberfest t-shirts out to the attendees. Everyone really love the quality of the t-shirts. Not only did everyone had a great time at a meetup, we also received really awesome swags.
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