Hacktoberfest has a special place in my tech journey because my tech and open source journey started during Hacktoberfest 2021 (it's been three years in tech and 4th year participating in Hacktoberfest, WOW!). This year, I was late to the party and registered for Hacktoberfest on 18 October, as I was stuck with some life problems.

So, like every other year, I participated as a Maintainer and a Contributor. To make this article more fun, I will share my combined experience for both and break down this article into two sections As a Contributor and As a Maintainer (Sorry, Dev team, I jammed in both things in one).

As a Contributor

Like last year I was looking for less popular projects that aren't popular, offering no swag or anything in return but need help, real help. I was so specific about the area of contribution because I wanted to upskill and test my knowledge in those things. I think this is what I like about open source most, there are so many pieces tied together to form a project, and we can choose which one we want to pick based on our interests. I tweeted the same as well.

So, I found a couple of repos by looking on Twitter and Hacktoberfest Discord that fit what I was looking for and helped them with the GitHub Actions and CI stuff, which improved their workflow for better maintaining the quality of code. Below is a snapshot of Pull Resuests I made last week.

The two best takeaways as a contributor I got from this Hacktoberfest are:

• There are a lot of projects that need help but don't have that much money, popularity and stars that can help them come under the limelight of contributors and people. We as contributors should try to find them and help them with the knowledge we have. There are many solopreneurs out there in the open source community, working hard to make an impact, and needed support.

• You can have a monumental impact on small and less known projects compared to big and utmost starts. There is nothing wrong with contributing to big projects, but with time, they become mature and the sheer volume of the contributors makes it difficult to cope. And, if you are new, you can have a tough time making your Pull Request work. A balance of both I think is great. I personally feel you learn a lot more in new and evolving projects as they tend to iterate and open to new ideas. So, they welcome contributions.

As a Maintainer

This year, I was unable to make my repo "ready" for Hacktoberfest, but I got some PRs on the non-technical front on the DevOps repo. In case you didn't know about this DevOps repo, it is one of the most popular open source repos in the world to learn DevOps with a whopping 2.8k+ GitHub stars.

As a maintainer this year, my takeaway was that even though we think the project is "complete" and "picture perfect" there is so much room to improve, and make it better when you learn from contributors' knowledge, value and the perspective they bring to the table.

2024 was fun. Looking forward to contributing even more next year. Happy Open Source!