I've been participating in Hacktoberfest for a few year now and it's always been a fun and interesting experience looking for projects I can lend a hand on.

This year however I happened to have a few public projects myself, one of my own and a few through work that I'm a maintainer of, so I figured I might as well open them up to Hacktoberfest contributions and see if there was any interest. I wasn't expecting much, but I was taken by surprise!

I've had public repos in past years, but never something really of interest to a wider audiance or with clear enough needs and defined work.

So the first thing I did was get a few github issues together for each. The work projects already had some, but I tidied them up and pull a few more from our internal bug tracker. For my own project I went though my local todo list and made issues for them. Finally I labelled the issues and the projects with the "hacktoberfest" tag, and marked a few more straight forward ones as "good first issues".

And then I went about my life. One morning however I saw a message about a pull request against the one repo. Someone had come along and was contributing! I reviewed the work, which was good (and actually improved some existing work), thanked them, and merged. The next morning there was another from the same developer! This issue had some ambiguity so we chatted about the work and before long they came back with changes and it too was merged. I was thrilled as these two issues were things that I had been meaning to get to for a bit, but hadn't had a chance.

I was even more surprised a few weeks later when someone opened a pull request against the one project with a minor refactor that improved the "pythonic" style of it. There was no issue around it, someone had just read through the code and saw a way it could be better. I don't know for sure that this developer came in via the hacktoberfest, but I suspect they may have.

So for me, this hacktoberfest helped me cross off a bunch of work from my todo, helped me clarified some of the work that when I documented the issues and agian when I discuss them with the other developer, and showed me some improvements that I hadn't even thought of. Overall a great experience.