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Szymon Stawski
Szymon Stawski

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Do not take part in Hacktoberfest, unless...

Short about Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is a month long event organized by DigitalOcean and other partners. The mission of this event is to celebrate open source and open source community, everyone can participate and contribute to the selected projects and thus support hardworking contributors and maintainers. If you want to learn more visit: https://hacktoberfest.com/

Do not take part in Hacktoberfest

... for a tshirt and stickers. Big part of open source community disapproves Hacktoberfest because of pull requests like this one:

Maintainers of open source projects are busy and overworked enough without spam PRs, let's at least try to respect their time and effort.

How to really help?

Have you ever created an issue on some OSS repository? Revisit it maybe other people have similar problems, check if you could work on it. Do it even if project do not take part in hacktoberfest. Resolving issues with the tag "hacktoberfest" is not the point of this event, the point is to support OSS maintainers and contributors.

Have you encountered some problems worth investigating while using open source software? Investigate, try to find the root cause, help in triage and try to resolve it.

If you are new to opensource and want to use hacktoberfest to start contributing, look for "hacktoberfest" and "good first issue" tags on issues. In general maintainers are helpful if your interest in contributing is genuine.

Few projects to look into

Odigos: https://github.com/keyval-dev/odigos/issues
LangChain: https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain/issues
OpenTelemetry: https://github.com/open-telemetry
Jeager: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/issues

Top comments (2)

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

There are no t-shirts this year, so there should be less of worthless PRs in theory.

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szymonst profile image
Szymon Stawski

Thanks for sharing Paweł. This is a step to the right direction another one is this rule:
Image description

I am glad to see hacktoberfest evolving.