This is a followup post to my previous Hacktoberfest related post.
TL;DR - Officially I’ve completed Hacktoberfest 2020!
The beginning of the month was a bit rough, and while there were good intentions, the level of communication to participants was not up to par. But eventually the news of the changes rolled out in a much more official way! For what it’s worth, I approve.
The change to make eligible repos opt-in will hopefully provide less of an unexpected disruption to open source maintainers. I imagine the spike in activity will belong to repos who want the commits. Also I hope the intended effect will cut down on greedy devs gaming the rules with low quality contributions to get free stuff.
The extended review time was still 2 weeks, but a couple days later after my post, I got an email acknowledging my 4 PRs. I’ve just been waiting for the clock to run out this entire time.
However, the time is here. Officially I’ve completed Hacktoberfest 2020!
My strategy
If you have never contributed to open source before, I can share what I usually do. I took a simple approach.
I crawled the Github search for Hacktoberfest labeled repos that were written in Rust because I was only interested in writing in that language.
There were quite a lot, so I picked a handful of the smallest Rust projects where the repo owner asked for some very specific contributions that were clear enough that it didn’t require me to ask questions before getting started. All things considered, it only took me a total of 2-3 hours to write code.
I did a bit of overcommunication with the repo maintainer to be friendly, but also to give the impression that changes can still be made with their feedback. I wanted to offer an opportunity for them to give me feedback so they would be happy with what they would get merged in.
If you didn’t know, you can reference issues from your commit message, which I did. Additionally I linked the PR to the issue, and I left a message in the issue itself describing my thought process. There were small changes requested by the maintainers, though every PR was eventually accepted and merged.
The Prize
So I’ve decided to plant a tree instead of receiving a shirt. It was nice that there was an alternative.
I don’t know what’s next. After completing the form I was told to await instructions from Digital Ocean for how to continue the process of planting the tree.
Either way, this is the end of the line. Hacktoberfest 2020 is done for me. I feel happy to have made a positive impact.
Thanks to Digital Ocean, Intel, Dev.to and the Hacktoberfest team for making this year happen!
In the future I will likely crawl the Github search for small Rust projects to contribute to live on my Twitch stream. If that interests you, or if you’d like me to contribute to your repo, then I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a follow!
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