In this post, I’d like to share my experience as a maintainer since Hacktoberfest 2022. Also, this is my first time writing in English, so feedback on this aspect would be greatly appreciated. Of course, AI helped me a little with the translation, so please be kind. 😊

Some context

The first time I participated in Hacktoberfest was in 2020. My leader suggested it as a learning activity for the whole team. At this point, I was developing my leadership skills and had put coding aside. I was a bit worried about my technical skills and wasn’t sure if I was capable of contributing to Open Source projects.

In my mind, Open Source was a space full of amazing projects that helped developers like me to build other projects for customers and end users. I mistakenly believed that becoming part of this community wasn’t really possible for me. When I received my swag months later, I felt proud of my achievement and kept Hacktoberfest in mind every year. This year, with the start of the 11th Hacktoberfest, I decided to write about my experience as a project maintainer.

Getting started

First I had to choose a simple project to maintain on GitHub. As a beginner maintainer, I wanted to attract beginner contributors too. The idea of helping people improve their skills and grow motivates me. There’s nothing better than a calculator built with simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We have a bunch of DOM elements and events to handle. The math is almost a side quest.

After starting the project, I opened some issues with simple tasks to improve it, like adding keyboard support, adding new math operations, etc. One of the simplest contributions was adding themes. Anyone could open an issue and submit a PR with a brand-new theme for the calculator.

I was so excited when the first contributions arrived that I stopped everything I was doing to check the new PRs and merge them immediately.

Conclusion

Since then, the project had 13 contributors, closed 16 issues, merged 23 PRs, and received 4 stars. The project hasn’t received any contributions other than mine recently, but if you’re looking for something to contribute to, feel free to join! :)

l4ur4oliveira / hacktober-calc

A simple calculator using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

2024

🟢🟡 Leia em Português

What?

Hacktober Calc 🧮 is a simple calculator using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Why?

It's the simplest project to exercise programming skills, DOM manipulation and layout construction. Plus, you can start to contribute to Open Source from this project and learn the Git workflow.

How to contribute?

• Including some themes
• Adding new math operations
• Improving keybord usage
• Writing some tests
• Refactoring something
• Translating
• Using your creativity \o/

Do you need a guide about PR? Watch this video.

Getting started

As a simple web project built with pure HTML, CSS and JS, you can run it using Live Server extension if you want. But if you want to explore the testing environment, follow the steps below.

• Install dependencies with npm install
• Run the project with npm run dev
• For tests use npm run test

Hall of Fame

Made by contrib.rocks

View on GitHub

I think the Hacktoberfest hype isn’t the same anymore, maybe because of changes in the swag policy (the tees and stickers were awesome). Even so, my experience in 2022 taught me a lot about Git and GitHub, English, communication, and, most importantly, Open Source contribution and its ecosystem.