I signed up for Hacktoberfest again this year.
I had all of the best intentions and I was looking forward to get involved in something not my regular work or open source projects.
I am in the process of learning Go, so I picked a Go project, found a good first issue and started working on it. The problem was that there was aspects of the code based I was not entirely understand and concepts I was not that familiar with, so I had to spend a lot of time reading the code and understanding the architecture and consulting Go documentation - all very fun, but time consuming.
At the same time work and life took some time consuming turns, not that it took all time at the keyboard away, but it did take large part of the energy and focus away.
When I finally found some keyboard time, I was not in a state to dig into complexity and I procrastinated into doing open source chores for some of the projects I am maintaining instead.
This is my GitHub activity graph for Oktober 2024:
So I would not say that I was lazy, I did just not work in the areas I had planned to and hoped for.
To be honest I am not a very competitive person, I do enjoy gamification, but oftentimes I think my OCD wins, meaning that doing the chores and connecting the dots become more important than uncovering unknowns and learning new things - and this honestly is what bothers me the most, since I am not learning new things, I am not growing at the pace I would like to.
That said, I am learning a tonnes of new stuff all the time, via work and open source, but I would like to learn faster and more in a more structured way and for the ambitions I have, like Go programming etc.
Anyway as I have stated before, I enjoy the Hacktoberfest and I will continue to participate in the future. But there are 11 other months where open source needs contributions and I will continue with the work on the project where I planned to do my first PR, yes there will be chores, but it is all about open source contribution and that is what it is all about - if you ask me anyway.
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