This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Maintainer Experience

This year's Hacktoberfest was about more than simply code contributions; it was also about project leadership and teamwork. Following my experience as a contributor in 2023, I decided to become a maintainer for the first time. I chose Tree2Hope, a charity website that promotes tree-planting activities, as my project to manage. Because it is designed with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, I believed it would be easy for anyone—beginner or expert—to contribute.

🚀 A Look at Some Awesome PRs

Throughout Hacktoberfest, I received approximately 20-30 pull requests, some of which stuck out.

• Animations and Preloader: One contributor enhanced the site with stunning animations and a preloader, making it more visually appealing while giving the impression of faster load times. The preloader was a smart feature, significantly improving the user experience.

• Optimizing Assets: Another important PR effort focused on reducing asset size, which resulted in a significant increase in website loading performance.

Each input helped to refine Tree2Hope, and it was exciting to see contributors come up with innovative ways to improve the project.

🎯 Lessons Learned: Quality Vs Quantity

Managing a project taught me a lot, particularly about balancing quality and quantity in contributions.

• Some contributors sincerely wanted to help, and they spent a lot of time writing well-thought-out PRs that solved real issues. These contributions positively impacted the project.

• However, I came across contributors who either disregarded assigned bugs or made useless PRs merely to reach their Hacktoberfest objective. As a maintainer, I learned to thoroughly review and, where necessary, reject PRs that did not bring value. Being selected is vital for maintaining the project's integrity.

🌍 Why Hacktoberfest?

Participating in Hacktoberfest as a maintainer provided me with a different perspective on the effort and patience required to handle open-source projects. I first joined Hacktoberfest in 2023 to contribute and learn, but as a maintainer, I've had the opportunity to guide others and develop my project along the way.

💡 Final Thoughts

Hacktoberfest 2024 has been a journey of growth, learning, and collaboration. Working on Tree2Hope and managing PRs showed me the value of encouraging genuine contributions while ensuring project quality. I am excited to continue this adventure and look forward to making future contributions.

Thank you, Hacktoberfest, for this amazing chance to participate, and a special thanks to all of the contributors who helped make this experience so exciting!