General Information

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source software by DigitalOcean that encourages participation in giving back to the open-source community. Developers get involved by completing pull requests, participating in events, and donating to open-source projects.

How to participate in Hacktoberfest?

To participate in this contest, you must register on its official website between September 26, 2022, and October 31, 2022. After registering, you must link your GitHub account from where you will contribute. You have to submit at least 4 PR's (Pull Requests) to a valid project/repository linked with Hacktoberfest. These PR's should not be spam as the project/repository owner must check them before merging. After the PR's are merged, Hacktoberfest takes a duration of 7 days before showing the count on your profile. In those 7 days, Hacktoberfest checks whether the PR's follow the required guidelines. If the PR is valid, Hacktoberfest will increase the count of accepted PR's on your profile, thus giving you a holopin badge.

Once all the pull requests have been accepted, you will get a link for swags.

My Journey

Discovering Hacktoberfest

It was October 7, 2022, I was scrolling my LinkedIn feed when I came across a post regarding Hacktoberfest. Initially, I thought it was something related to 'hacking' because the name says 'hack'-toberfest. After surfing the internet and gathering information about this contest, I found that it involves 'open-source contribution', a term that fascinates me a lot. I not only registered but also referred it to fellow contributors.

Open source connects people all around the world.

Finding the Right Project

The next step to the Hacktoberfest contest is finding the right project to contribute to. For a valid Hacktoberfest project, the repository should be labeled with #hacktoberfest or #hacktoberfest2022. Since my interest was in Data Structures and Algorithms, I found some repositories with suitable labels to contribute to.

Contribution Starts

After searching for projects, the next task was to find suitable issues to contribute to. Going through the project, one must understand it carefully and contribute effectively. All my PR's were attached with a message which says to accept the PR for Hacktoberfest. The worst part about contributing was that some repositories were fake and invalid and even after contributing, Hacktoberfest discards the contribution. Sometimes my repositories were discarded during the period of 7 days. It was a very frustrating period, but I was also enjoying it at the same time as it was an amazing experience to find new opportunities. There were times when the project maintainer itself assigned an issue to me, which helped me to sense a feeling of responsibility toward the project. It further helped to improve my contributions.

The projects in which I contributed were:

• itsbittoosharma
• TARANG0503
• souvikg544
• saatvik25
• MaheshDoiphode
• thepranaygupta

Journey as a Project Maintainer

Hacktoberfest also allows you to be a contributor as well as a project maintainer at the same time. You have to follow some guidelines while maintaining a project. I made a public repository of Data Structures and Algorithms and labeled it with #hacktoberfest and #hacktoberfest2022. There were more than 100 PR's in my repository. Since I was not so sure about how to maintain a repository, this experience was very delightful and gave me confidence. I tried to go through most of the PR's to ensure that it was not spam or duplicate. If a duplicate PR was merged, then the Hacktoberfest would mark my repository as invalid. All the merged PR's were labeled with hacktoberfest-accepted label.

Overall Experience

Overall, Hacktoberfest 2022 was a great experience. It was like a roller-coaster ride for me; I had many ups and downs during this contest. I had 5 out of 10 PRs that were accepted. Rest of them were rejected because the projects were fake, or there were too many spam PR's in that repository. During my contribution period, I had access to get mentored and meet amazing people in this field. Most of them were seniors who helped a lot and gave good guidance regarding the open-source journey. As a project maintainer, I had the privilege to go through various codes and understand various people's thought process while solving a particular problem. Also, I got a chance to mentor various people and share my knowledge with others.

Hacktoberfest Result

I got 4 holopin digital badges after all my 4 PR's got accepted. Other than this, I had got a DEV BADGE and a SWAG PACK.

git commit -m "Happy Hacktoberfest Everyone!"