<![CDATA[ hacktoberfest - freeCodeCamp.org ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/universal/favicons/favicon.png <![CDATA[ hacktoberfest - freeCodeCamp.org ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ Eleventy Wed, 27 May 2026 16:22:04 +0000 60 <![CDATA[ Hacktoberfest 2023 Contributors ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/hacktoberfest-2023-contributors/ 66ac7ee5ed08c5b0125be187 Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:03:39 +0000 The freeCodeCamp community just finished participating in this year's Hacktoberfest – a month-long celebration of open source.

Our core team is excited to recognize all of our wonderful open source contributors. A big thank you to all of these folks for the effort they put into helping improve our curriculum and learning resources.

Thank you for your contributions to open source. 🎉

Hacktoberfest Contributions for freeCodeCamp

Hacktoberfest Contributions for DevDocs

Thank you to all of these contributors! If you are interested in becoming a contributor as well, we recommend starting with our contributing guidelines. If you have any questions feel free to ask us in our Discord server.

]]> <![CDATA[ A Project Maintainer's Guide to Hacktoberfest ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/project-maintainer-guide-to-hacktoberfest/ 66c4c647bd556981b1bdc455 Thu, 28 Sep 2023 07:02:33 +0000 Hacktoberfest is a month-long event that promotes open-source contributions, collaboration, and projects.

Participating in this event as either a project maintainer or a contributor gives new perspectives to either your project or your career. You also get to meet fun people.

This article will walk you through how to become a great, successful project maintainer.

Project Preparation

Ensuring that your project meets the guidelines of the Hacktoberfest team and is easy for your contributors to contribute to is essential.

You need to define the goals you want to achieve during the event. It would be helpful if you jot it down on a post-it note.

Your goal might be to draw more attention to your project or to give new contributors a safe place to make small changes that would help their careers.

README Files and Contribution Guidelines

Documentation is a huge part of your project preparation. But before you document, you need to define your goals for the project.

Your documentation should be focused on helping new contributors get started.

Create a good README file that explains your project’s usage, how to set it up, and how to contribute.

Besides having a README file, your projects should also have guidelines that new contributors need to follow.

Create a clear guide on how contributors can get involved in your project and what kinds of contributions they can make, and outline the coding standards or guidelines for the project.

Licensing and Code of Conduct

Before anyone can contribute to your project, ensure it has an open-source license. The license is there to protect you and your contributors.

An open-source project without the proper licensing file could sue contributors for copy and paste and patent rights infringement. To avoid this, select an open-source license that aligns with your project's goals.

Next, you would need to define a code of conduct to ensure that during the Hacktoberfest event, the contributors are respectful of others and inclusive.

Project’s GitHub Repository

Hacktoberfest projects are usually on GitHub. Setting up a Git repository should get you started.

If you have an account, ensure the repository is up to date. If you don’t have an account, create one.

Make sure your project’s source code and documentation are on the Git repository.

According to Hacktoberfest guidelines, add the "hacktoberfest" topic to your repository to opt-in to Hacktoberfest and indicate you’re looking for contributions.

Setting Up Issues

Issues are like a To-do list for your contributors. They can use it to track the bugs, features, or upgrades they need to get involved in.

Setting up an issue template helps your contributors to propose changes to your project.

Promoting Your Project

Once you are done setting up your project and its guidelines, you need to promote your project to reach the target audience.

This is where you use social media platforms like Twitter (X), Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn to reach a wider audience of people.

You would need compelling project descriptions that engage contributors to get involved.

If possible, consider hosting a Twitter space or webinar to talk about your projects, the solution to a real-world problem, and how contributors to get started.

Contributor Engagements

Once the event begins and you get contributors working on issues, you would need to engage your contributors by doing the following:

  • Review and merge Pull Requests. Ensure you only merge valuable contributions.
  • Give clear feedback to your contributors to improve their work.
  • Appreciate your contributors. You can do this by either doing a shout-out on social media or sending thank you messages.
  • Ensure they remember the code of conduct and let them know the consequences of violating the conduct.

You can also create a GitHub discussion platform where you get to interact with the project contributors. This way you can easily manage the contribution during the event time period.

Conclusion

This guide walked through the needed steps for project maintainers to make the most of the Hacktoberfest event.

By joining as a maintainer, you get the opportunity to meet people, get new ideas, and grow your project. These collaborations or contributions could make a long-lasting impact to your project.

Preparing your project, engaging with your project’s contributors, staying committed to your goals, and creating an inclusive space for all contributions could enhance your project.

Besides being a maintainer, embrace the spirit of open-source and collaboration and have fun during the event.

]]> <![CDATA[ Hacktoberfest 2022 Contributors ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/hacktoberfest-2022-contributors/ 66ac7ed59e10a480c1303778 Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:25:10 +0000 freeCodeCamp participated in Hacktoberfest (a month-long celebration of open source) again this year.

We wanted to take a moment to thank all of our wonderful contributors for the effort they put in to help us continue to improve our curriculum and learning resources.

Thank you for your contributions to open source. 🎉

Hacktoberfest Contributions for freeCodeCamp

Hacktoberfest Contributions for DevDocs

Hacktoberfest Contributions for Developer Quiz Site

Thank you to all of these contributors! If you are interested in becoming a contributor as well, we recommend starting with our contributing guidelines, and if you have any questions feel free to ask us in our Discord server.

]]> <![CDATA[ What I Learned from Maintaining a Repo During Hacktoberfest and Merging 356 PRs ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-i-learned-as-a-hacktoberfest-repo-maintainer/ 66b8da66eb5c4db85a0b3444 Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:17:06 +0000 Hacktoberfest is a month long celebration of open source. And this year I participated as a maintainer for freeCodeCamp's Developer Quiz Site.

I merged a total of 356 pull requests and helped a lot of new contributors get started with open source. We were able to add a total of 477 new quiz questions to the Developer Quiz Site.

Here are some more statistics:

Stats on Oct 1, 2022

Number of questions: 694

Forks: 61

Stars:42

Stats on November 1, 2022

Number of questions: 1171

Forks: 246

Stars: 109

This month long journey has been crazy, productive, fun and educational. Here are all of the things that I learned during Hacktoberfest 2022.

Table of Contents

How it All Began

In December of 2021, freeCodeCamp was launching their Learn to Code RPG game. It's an interactive visual novel that follows Lydia's dream of becoming a developer.

I was involved with helping to create quiz questions on topics like HTML, CSS, Computer Science, Python, and so on for the initial launch.

About a week before the launch, Quincy approached me and a few others to build out a Developer Quiz Site. This was meant to be a companion site to the Learn to Code RPG game and provide campers with a way to practice more quiz questions outside of the game.

The initial launch of the Developer Quiz Site had about 600+ quiz questions. We also created a few open issues in the repository for the community to add more questions to the site.

Image

During parts of 2022, there was a moderate amount of activity in the repository but a lot of the time it remained rather slow. But once September rolled around, I thought about entering the Developer Quiz Site into Hacktoberfest.

I reached out to Quincy and he thought it was a great idea because we could use this opportunity to get more quiz questions from the community.

Preparing for Hacktoberfest

There were about 3 weeks left before Hacktoberfest started. Here is how I used that time to get the repository ready.

Step 1: Adding the Hacktoberfest topic and labels

The first step was to add the Hacktoberfest topic to the repository so people knew we were participating in this year's event. I spruced up the About section and added the appropriate labels to help invite people to the repository.

Image

I then made sure to create the hacktoberfest-accepted label so I could apply it to each approved PR to help us keep track of the total number of Hacktoberfest PR's. I also added the spam, hacktoberfest, and first-timers-only labels because I knew they would come in handy.

Image

Step 2: Creating issue templates

GitHub issue templates are a great way to ensure that contributors provide all of the necessary information for bug fixes, documentation changes, feature requests or general issues.

I decided to setup 5 issue categories and make certain fields required so contributors would provide some level of detail to the issues they were creating.

Image

Image

Step 3: Updating the contributing documentation

When the repository was initially created, the contributing documentation pointed to the general freeCodeCamp contributing guidelines. While that documentation is very thorough, it wasn't specific enough on how people could best contribute to the Developer Quiz site repository in particular.

I decided to completely overhaul the documentation and create a new in depth file just for the Developer Quiz Site. Since I anticipated that we would have a lot of beginners with Git and GitHub, I tried to make it as accessible and beginner friendly as possible.

Image

Step 4: Creating well-defined issues

In order to attract contributors to our repository, I knew that we needed to have some clearly defined issues. If the issues were too vague, then I knew people would have tons of questions or might not be interested in contributing.

I made sure to include all of the necessary guidelines for submission, including code snippets for the proper formatting, links to the Code of Conduct, Contributing docs, and links to the files they needed to change.

Here is an example of one of the issues I created to encourage more JavaScript questions.

Sample issue

developerquiz.org currently has over 600 quiz questions. We are looking to expand on the JavaScript questions and we encourage other developers to add their quiz questions to the site.

Please note: we are only focusing on general JavaScript questions instead of library and framework specific questions.

You can find the complete list of questions below. https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/Developer_Quiz_Site/blob/main/src/data/javascript-quiz.ts

You can add your own questions to the top of that file. Please first check to make sure your question doesn't already exist in the file before creating a PR.

Here is an example format for the questions. 

  {
    Question:
      "In JavaScript, what is the name of the method used to remove white space from the beginning and end of a string?",
    Answer: ".trim()",
    Distractor1: ".substring()",
    Distractor2: ".reduce()",
    Distractor3: ".slice()",
    Explanation:
      "The .trim() method removes white space (including space, tab, etc.) from both ends of a string and returns a new string without modifying the original.",
    Link: "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/trim",
  },

For the link field, please make sure to use a freeCodeCamp article, freeCodeCamp YouTube video, or official documentation. If you choose to reference a video, please make sure to include the timestamp for the topic covered.

You can read more about how to create timestamps in this helpful article.

This issue will not be assigned to anyone and will remain open for multiple contributors.

Please do not assign yourself to this issue or close it.

Happy contributing!

For most of our issues, I wanted multiple contributors to be able to participate. So I added a disclaimer at the bottom letting people know that it would remain open and wouldn't be assigned to anyone.

I also made sure to add the good-first-issue, help-wanted, and hacktoberfest labels to help attract more contributors.

Step 5: Adding Saved replies

Saved replies is a feature on GitHub were you can create and save your own messages that you intend to use repeatedly in issues and pull requests.

I decided to create the following replies:

Image

I wanted replies to congratulate both first time and returning contributors because they took the time to make our repository better.

Image

I also wanted to create a reply where I thanked the contributor for their contribution and requested changes to the pull request.

Image

The last reply I created was to let contributors know that their pull request was reviewed but was not going to be accepted. I saw that the main freeCodeCamp learn repository used a similar reply so I wanted to include it in the Developer Quiz Site repository.

Image

Step 6: Opening up GitHub Discussions

A few days before Hacktoberfest started, I wanted to open up another avenue for contributors to ask questions and propose new features. So I decided to open up GitHub discussions.

Image

When I created this post, we had a few people new to the repository feel welcomed to contribute and happy that there was a place to connect with me and other contributors.

Now that everything was in place, the countdown to Hacktoberfest was underway.

Lessons I learned during Hacktoberfest

Right from day 1, I was pretty busy reviewing pull requests and helping new contributors get started in open source. But the whole experience was very educational and rewarding.

Here are a few lessons that I learned during this time.

Lead with patience, empathy, and kindness

We were all beginners once, and sometimes it is scary to learn something new. I made sure to lead with kindness and empathy because I remember what it was like to just start out in open source.

Every time a new question came in, I made sure to reply back and provide as much as assistance as I could to help them resolve the issue. This resulted in a welcoming and safe environment to learn.

Image

We also had times where some contributors wanted to add quiz questions but were nervous because English is not their first language. My job was to assure them that I was here to help and not pass judgement on spelling or grammar mistakes.

I believe that helped in the larger volume of quiz questions we ended up getting.

Don't get worked up over spam

One of the downsides to Hacktoberfest is the increased amount of spam pull requests for open source maintainers. While this is frustrating to deal with, I learned pretty quickly to just close the PR, label it as spam, and move on.

There was no point in arguing with them or getting upset because that is wasted energy. The majority of people did want to meaningfully contribute and that is where I chose to spend my energy.

How to gracefully close PR's that will not be accepted

One of the surprising issues that came up were people wanting to take quiz questions and explanations from other quiz sites and add it to freeCodeCamp's Developer Quiz Site. The first couple of times this happened, I closed the pull request and let them know that this is plagiarism and we can't accept that.

Well, I received a response back from one contributor stating that they didn't realize and they wanted to know if they could try again. I assured them that they were free to create a new PR and I could help them with any spelling or grammar.

This led me to revise my response to let contributors know that they weren't in trouble and were free to contribute again in the future with their own questions.

Image

This helped to maintain a healthy open source environment and most of those cases ended up being prolific contributors after they understood the rules.

Conclusion

I am really glad that I participated as a maintainer in this year's Hacktoberfest. I learned a lot about communication, empathy, patience, and leadership.

I hope my post encourages you to want to get involved with open source either as a maintainer or contributor in the future.

]]> <![CDATA[ How to Participate in Hacktoberfest – Even if You Don't Write Code ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-anyone-can-participate-in-hacktoberfest/ 66d460ee3a8352b6c5a2aafb Wed, 06 Oct 2021 15:14:48 +0000 Hacktoberfest is an event hosted by DigitalOcean that partners with many organizations. The goal is to give back and contribute to open-source projects. The organizers offer little incentives for a job well done, like a shirt and stickers.

Other organizations also get involved by offering their own rewards. You can find a community-sourced list of organizations offering incentives to contribute on Hacktoberfest Swag.

Only meaningful contributions will count toward the total 4 required. Take your time and show common courtesy with maintainers to ensure your pull requests get merged. More on this in Let's Avoid Turning it into Spamtoberfest below.

How you can Participate in Hacktoberfest

It's important to note that Hacktoberfest is for making any quality contribution to open-source projects. No one said it has to be code!

Everyone is capable of putting something forward:

  • Authors

  • Artists

  • Software Developers

  • Technical Writers

  • Translators

I'm not going to explicitly list repositories for contributing code because that's easy enough to find. All repositories listed on the following links have opted-in to Hacktoberfest.

  • GitLab (All repositories with the topic hacktoberfest on GitLab.)

  • GitHub (All repositories with the topic hacktoberfest on GitHub.)

Below are projects I recommend if you don't know how to code but still want to contribute to open-source (or Creative Commons) projects. It only includes projects that have manually opted-in to Hacktoberfest.

You shouldn't need to know any programming languages or HTML to contribute to them. You will be expected to know how to commit your work with Git, though, which we'll cover later.

Art

Projects that need art or animations:

Awesome Lists

Community-maintained lists of resources:

Books

Free eBooks maintained with a docs-as-code approach:

Configuration

Projects that revolve around configuration files. A contribution could just be appending an entry to a JSON file:

Documentation

Projects where you just have to type in plain English. Programming and technical knowledge will help, but there's no need for a specialized skill.

This only includes repositories that maintain documentation in a format that would be simple for most users, like Markdown.

Translations

Projects that need text translated from English to other languages.

Projects that use crowd-translations platforms like Weblate aren't included here, since the translator doesn't create the pull request. Unfortunately, Hacktoberfest only considers whoever opened the pull request, not the authors of the changes.

Please make sure that you only contribute human-reviewed translations – so either translated by a human, or machine-translated but verified by a human. Again, quality is important.

Miscellaneous

Projects that are one of a kind:

Let's Avoid Turning it into Spamtoberfest

Unfortunately, Hacktoberfest has developed a bit of a bad reputation among some projects due to spam. Sometimes contributors can be a bit eager to complete Hacktoberfest and miss the point. ^-^'

From 2020, if a user makes 2 pull requests that get assigned a label with the word spam or invalid in it, the contributor will be banned from Hacktoberfest indefinitely, including future events.

Mindustry handles this the best in my opinion with the Hacktoberfest Hall of Shame.

From 2021, Hacktoberfest is doing more to crack down on spam by excluding projects that encourage pull requests with no value.

Image

The goal of giving back to open-source gets undermined if most contributions just go to "Complete Hacktoberfest!" repositories.

How to make valuable Hacktoberfest contributions

  • You have a month to make the 4 pull requests. Use it! They're more likely to get merged if you make fewer good quality pull requests.

  • Don't assume every pull request you make will be merged before Hacktoberfest is over. Try to do more than 4 if you can!

Practice common courtesy

Open-source maintainers have a life too. They don't always have time to review all pull requests, especially towards the end of Hacktoberfest.

Don't make maintainers feel bad, don't rush them, and don't demand attention. Just work on something else if they're busy.

How to Commit Work and Open a Pull Request

Now that you know how to be a helpful Hacktoberfest participant, and you've learned about some projects you'll be able to contribute too, the only thing left is to actually learn how to contribute.

GitHub and GitLab both provide ways to simplify contributing for small changes. We're not going to use them because it'll be simpler to show a single set of instructions that will work everywhere rather than rely on platform-specific features.

Before you continue, pick a repository that you want to contribute to. If you're multilingual then tldr-pages will be easiest, otherwise consider Free Programming Books.

I'm going to use Free Programming Books in my examples.

How to install Git

First, you should install Git which is a version control system. This is the tool that projects are using to manage changes.

Windows users can download it from the git-scm website. Linux users can install it using their preferred package manager.

Once you have Git installed, verify it's installed correctly with git --version.

Now configure your name and email address. The name doesn't matter, but you should specify the same email address you're using for Hacktoberfest.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your@email.org"

Note that the email address you specify here will be considered public information once your pull request has been merged. Anyone can view the details of a commit which includes the author details.

For example, my email address is in the output when I do git log on one of my commits.

commit 9647912b202a57474b4cd0ce796126c462c1ecc0 (HEAD -> added-react-book, develop/added-react-book)
Author: Seth Falco <seth@falco.fun>
Date:   Tue Oct 5 14:04:25 2021 +0200

    added a react book from digitalocean

If this is a problem, both GitHub and GitLab provide a feature to hide your email address by giving you a disposable one. You can enable the feature and use that email address in git config instead.

How to fork and clone a repository

Next, you'll want to fork the repository. You won't be allowed to push changes directly to the repository, so instead you'll make a fork which is a copy of the project that's under your control.

Image

The "Fork" button is at the top-right of the repository page.

Next, clone the repository locally. This pulls a copy of everything in the repository to your machine so you can start working on it.

We'll do this in the terminal. If you're on Windows you can use Command Prompt or PowerShell.

Go to an appropriate location on your file system like your Downloads or Documents directory, then execute this following:

  • Clone the repository you want to work on.

  • Enter the directory in the terminal.

  • Link the repository with the fork on your account.

git clone https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books.git
cd free-programming-books
git remote add develop https://github.com/{YOUR_USERNAME}/free-programming-books.md

How to work with the project

Now that you've cloned the repository locally, you can start working with it. With most repositories, it's best to open it up in a code editor like Visual Studio Code, but you can technically work with any text editor including Notepad.

Open the directory containing the repository you cloned in your editor. By default, it's named after the repository name, for example I now have a folder named free-programming-books.

Now you can make changes:

  • If you're not sure what to do, check if there's anything specific they need by looking under the "Issues" tab on the repository.

  • Alternatively, make whatever meaningful change you want.

With Free Programming Books, it's a repository for maintaining a list of free eBooks, so we can add more resources to it.

DigitalOcean has some great books in the community section of their website, so we can just add one or more of them to the repository. I've picked out How To Code in React.js for this example.

I can go to the respective section in the project which is the books/free-programming-books-langs.md file, and add the resource under the React section of the document.

The line I added looks like this:

* [How To Code in React.js](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/books/how-to-code-in-react-js-ebook) - Joe Morgan

How to commit your work

Now that you've made a change, you'll want to actually commit and push your work back up.

You've only made the change locally so far – now we want to send a pull request. This basically means you'll send a request asking the maintainer of the repository to include your changes in their repository.

In your terminal, we'll execute the following which will:

  • Create a new branch.

  • Tell Git you want to stage all changes to be saved.

  • Commit the change with a message describing what you did.

  • Push the changes to your fork.

git checkout -b added-react-book
git add .
git commit -m "added a react book from digitalocean"
git push develop added-react-book

This should hopefully produce output like the following:

Enumerating objects: 7, done.
Counting objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 1.07 KiB | 1.07 MiB/s, done.
Total 4 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (3/3), completed with 3 local objects.
remote: 
remote: Create a pull request for 'added-react-book' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/SethFalco/free-programming-books/pull/new/added-react-book
remote: 
To github.com:SethFalco/free-programming-books.git
 * [new branch]        added-react-book -> added-react-book

How to create a pull request

Both GitHub and GitLab will drop a link in the output of the command above that will take you to open a pull request.

If you click that link (you may need to hold CTRL), it'll take you to a page where you can provide more information and submit your pull request.

Image

Just fill in the details requested and click "Create pull request". All that's left is to wait for the maintainers to review it.

Clean up the code

As soon as you've finished a pull request, you should leave your branch and go back to the primary branch of the repository.

Execute the following commands in your terminal:

  • Check if the primary branch is main or master.

  • Switch to the primary branch of the repository.

  • Update your local copy to be in sync with the repository.

git branch
git checkout main
git pull

Restart from the "How to work with the project" step to make more changes.

Conclusion

I hope this gives more information about Hacktoberfest, and that you feel more confident participating with the open-source community even if you don't write software.

Best of luck with your pull requests!

]]> <![CDATA[ What I learned by diving into Hacktoberfest for the first time ]]> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-results-of-dipping-my-toes-in-this-hacktoberfest-3def90987fcc/ 66d852b429e30bc0ad4775ba Tue, 06 Nov 2018 23:55:20 +0000 By Travis Fantina

Imposter syndrome is something we all struggle with to one degree or another. Imposter syndrome is the fear of exposure as a fraud. If you’re anything like me you have felt like your work was not good enough to show. Or you weren’t far along enough in your journey as a developer to have much to contribute.

After learning about Hacktoberfest last year, I wanted to contribute. But I felt overwhelmed, and imposter syndrome began to take hold.

I told myself I was too inexperienced as a developer and I worried that my commits wouldn’t be worthwhile. Unfortunately, I let those fears get the better of me, and I didn’t even bother signing up.

This year I forced myself to set my fears aside, studied this post on Hacktoberfest, and I dove in. I’m going to share a little of what I worked on and the benefits of getting involved. Benefits that go far beyond getting a shirt and can be had 12 months out of the year!

Image _Image: [twillo](https://www.twilio.com/blog/hacktoberfest-and-new-twilioquest-mission-here" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

My Hacktoberfest experience

I began on October 11th. I was starting at a slight disadvantage already being a third of the way through the month.

The time crunch motivated me. I decided I would try to submit a pull request every Friday and once during the week for the rest of the month. Setting a schedule was important. I focused on pull requests two or three days out of the week and tried not to stress the rest of the time. Regardless of how ambitious your goal is, five pull requests in a month or five pull requests in a week: it’s important to have a plan.

My first pull request was on freeCodeCamp. I was working through some of the JavaScript algorithms challenges. I noticed a link pointing to an unexpected location. It was a simple fix but it provided some needed confidence. There were indeed things out there that I could tackle!

The pull request was easy, I didn’t fork or clone the freeCodeCamp repository, I opened it right on the GitHub page.

Boom first pull request opened.

I didn’t want all five pull requests to come from one repository (although there is nothing wrong with that). After a few pull requests on freeCodeCamp, I started venturing out and exploring GitHub.

I started by looking at projects I was familiar with familiar with. Specifically, I browsed tools and projects that I had used a lot like Rails, React, Bootstrap, and Devise, among others. Whenever possible I searched by issues tagged “Hacktoberfest”, “First Time Contributor” or “Easy”.

Image GitHub makes it easy to search through issues

With larger projects, there are a lot more contributors. The easy issues tend to get ironed out fairly quickly. I narrowed my search to smaller repositories.

A few years ago a friend and I built a reviews site for professors called “AvalueMeuProfessor”. Working on that project I discovered a library called jQuery Raty. This library makes it easy to add voting stars to your project. Although it has over 2,000 stars on GitHub there were only 21 contributors. It had several unresolved issues.

Image Raty doing it’s thing…

Improving what I could, I submitted a pull request that added value to the project. This is important. The size or scope of your pull request doesn’t matter but it should provide value to the project. It was merged into the project in a few hours.

Even though I only fixed typos in the documentation I gained a new understanding of how the library worked. It also gave me a greater appreciation for the project and its maintainers.

Through my work with Rails and the Raty app, I happened across an abandoned Ruby gem. It served jQuery Raty into the Rails asset pipeline: simple but useful. There were a few open issues but the readme made it clear that the project was abandoned.

Again, this was an ideal project because it was small in scope and activity on the project was minimal… none.

I forked the repository and began updating the gem to make it compatible with Rails 5. In the process, I learned a bit about the asset pipeline and a whole lot of how Rails gems work. I read several articles on creating gems that I otherwise would have never seen. In the process, I reached out to the original creator. He was no longer interested in managing the project and I took it over. It’s now maintained on my fork.

Despite my initial insecurities about contributing, I took the plunge and pushed myself. I was hoping for a shirt but I ended up getting a more. I was able to:

  • Submit my first pull request in a public repo
  • Learn a lot about Ruby gems
  • Take over the maintenance of a gem
  • Gain a new appreciation for some of the tools and resources I have used for years
  • Boost my average commits for the month (by a lot)
  • Became more comfortable with Git both on GitHub and through the CLI

Image _Hacktoberfest gets it done! (From [https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com" rel="noopener" target="blank" title="))

Above all else, my participation is Hacktoberfest has made me a better developer with a greater desire to contribute. I’ve seen that there is room in these projects for new contributors.

You may want to contribute but worry that you are not good enough or don’t know where to start. But contributing to open source repos is not only for senior developers with years of experience. Contributing to projects is a great way to improve your skills, gain confidence and practice coding. While finding the right project may take a bit of searching, it will be well worth your while.

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