Hacktoberfest, the best motivation to contribute to opensource projects! 💪

🗓️ This is my 6th participation, my 4th as a maintainer of projects.

I am working in Zenika, a French IT company, where Open Source takes part from DNA. Zenika can offers some days to contribute to open source projects or work on our projects. For the past 3 years, I have been trying to organize events to promote Open Source.

Year after year I spend more and more time to help people than contribute but I have my ritual.

🗓️ My ritual to prepare Hacktoberfest

I created a short project called Git-pull that allows you to refresh your git project in a single command : cf GitLab project.

Very perfectible project but one year I received contributions. Every year, I refresh the project (and others I have) to welcome people if they find my project 😁 and want to contribute to. It's not a popular project, and I don't expect it to become one. I just created it because I need this feature, I didn't find any projects doing this, and it allows me to work on Golang langage.

🤗 Welcome to new Open source lovers

I am also involved in others projects, such as Nantes Community.

It's a project to list all tech communities in my French city, Nantes. It's a very simple project that uses Markdown. With others communities organizers, we worked after a DevFest Nantes edition to list all communities information and events in a same website.

There are no new features to add to this project, but I'm working on a non Open source project to send and edit this project with all the events of the week.

At Zenika, we have some Open source projects.

It's not my projects, but I sometimes contributed on and I look if new contributor come and need help. Hacktoberfest is a very good way to welcome new Open source contributor and it's important, for me, to welcome as the best we can do. Maybe some contributors want to only validate the Hacktoberfest challenge but I am sure a big part of them will continue to contribute on Open source projects.

A great project to start contributing to is "The Duck Gallery". This application (created by Benjamin) lets you customize a duck, the Zenika mascot, and add it to this application. It's a very fun way to make your first contribution !

Before Hacktoberfest, I try to reduce my personal and professional activities to focus on this event. Of course, Open source takes time 😁.

🙌 Help people on the Hacktoberfest Discord

There is a discord Hacktoberfest : https://discord.gg/hacktoberfest. As a maintainer, I sometimes share my projects, ready to welcome new contributor as I mentionned before. However I prefer share my experience and mentoring some people. The last year I help 3 persons to contribute to Open source projects and this is more important for me than contribute. I contribute throughout the year and I also enjoy taking breaks to help others.

✨ Tips to contribute

As a Open source project maintainer, if I could give you some advice, I'd simply say thank you for contributing or wanting to contribute to Open source projects.

Open source is everywhere, we use it all the times. However, it's important to remember that open-source development is primarily done in people's personal time. So, if you don't have any response from the author or maintainer, please be patient. These people have a personal life and others activities than development to do.

Other tip, please ask or declare on an issue that you want to work on a feature or bug. Maintainer will assigned you the issue.
It can be a very frustrating experience if you submit one Pull / Merge Request (PR/MR) and see that someone else has done the same thing a few minutes before you, rendering your work obsolete.

Enjoy Hacktoberfest and Open Source! 🤘