About Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is an event held by Digital Ocean and Dev.to along with its sponsors and supporters as a celebration of open source software and it open to everyone in global community. Hacktoberfest have several rules, but in general you just need to make any certain number (4 in 2019) of pull request to any open source repository you like. Of course you need to sign up first on their website to make sure your contributions is tracked. When you made pull request as in the rule of game, you can claim rewards some swags like T-shirt and stickers.

Year of VuejsID

This is my 3rd years participation in hacktoberfest. As a maintainer for several open source code, this event open many possibilities for other developers helping me to solving many small issues and chores I can not deal with it. This year, I try to focusing my energy to finishing my personal goal. Driving the Vue.js community in Indonesia to continue our one small step in helping our own people to be easier learning Vue.js with the docs translation project. Actually, this project is already run for several months ago but we lost our focus and the progress was stucked without any contributors creating any pull requests again. You can check the finish one in our website docs.vuejs.id, the repo is already integrated with Netlify build so it will always update as our PR merged.

For achieving the goal to finish up the translation project, when the October started I also starting to create many issues to chunking the translation section for any contributors. They can easily pick their own issues, claim it and starting to work on the translation process. I must say thank you very much for all contributors, You’ve very help us.

VuejsID closed 35 PR in October 🥳🥳🥳

But actually, it’s not finish yet. If you have time, please help us to pick the issue and translate the docs to Bahasa Indonesia.

Helping first timers

Even I am very busy as a full time engineer in start-up, I do need help VuejsID to drive the translation project, I still have a some free time to manage my own repository to help people outside to create a simple contribution since so many first time contributors in this Hacktoberfest. I want to help to learn the common workflow to contribute into open source code. The repository is not new, already created since a years ago but I think it still relevant to help first timer contributor. The repo success merging 180 PR in October, at least I can help 180 different person to make their first open source contribution.

My own contribution

I have privileged because I am an admin for several Github organization. This position is helping to achieve 4 pull requests this year, because I can fork my own repo from those organizations and create my own pull requests then merged it by my self 🤣. And it counted as one pull request in Hacktoberfest, Very easy win for me.

But I see my team mate Antony creating a good repository called Gitcard, and I see he’s not really focus on the UI area since it’s very early phase. I decided to create some PR to his repository to tackle UI issues. It also help me to achieve the pull requests target.

And here I am, mission accomplished!

My opinions about Hacktoberfest

I already creating some of open source project, most of them is not funded yet and not give me a direct benefit in financial. But because it’s not my goal in creating open source so I will declined those part. Many people outside there is always asking about the direct benefits (in term of financial) when asking about open source. In my personal opinions, the benefits of open source is not always direct money. It’s joy for me to help other developer, community or my close friends through my knowledge in coding. I have mate and become a close friend with many good developers because of my open source code.

Hacktoberfest is one of appreciation for open source contributors that doesn’t get the indirect benefits from open source, so now I can say, you may will get some cool swags if you contribute to open source. Even I can not guarantee you will, but at least many developers already prove that words.

So why this year you don’t get a swags from Hacktoberfest? Come on, it’s not hard for you as a developers that creating many pull requests every days. Next year you should join this event!