It’s that time of the year again. A great initiative by DigitalOcean called Hacktoberfest that aims to bring more people to open source is about to start.
Hacktoberfest incentives people to make at least 4 valuable contributions (pull requests) to an open source repository and get the reward in form of either a fancy T-shirt or planting a tree in your name. See full rules here.
What is it all about?
There is no doubt that open source is the living heart of today’s internet. Having countless dev tools and frameworks ready at your disposal at zero cost is a huge advantage that was unimaginable in the past and plays a big role in the pace we as an industry go forward.
Some of these projects are backed by large companies (like H2O Wave) that would either like to give back to the community or being open source is part of their business model. However, many more projects are to this day only maintained by ordinary people who are usually not paid for their work and do it as a hobby. This is of course not sustainable and means that one day your beloved framework may not be there anymore.
What can we do about that?
It’s simple. Give back. Find an interesting repository, search through the issues that are usually labeled as good first issue or something similar, and start working on it.
If you feel like you do not have much experience to work on the issue independently, do not hesitate to comment on the issue and ask for help. I believe most of the maintainers will be helpful.
Making a few simple contributions to unexplored repositories results not only in a good feeling but also acts as a learning experience. You will suddenly become exposed to new languages, architectures, frameworks, patterns, etc. that you might leverage in your day-to-day work.
The best part that most people do not know about? You might even get a job as most of the open source projects are understaffed and require very niche knowledge which makes hiring more difficult. If you contribute enough valuable PRs, chances are high that you get a job offer without a coding/take-home interview since you already showed you can code.
I don’t know how to code
That’s fine. Not all contributions have to be strictly related to code. You can either contribute by improving docs, verifying something works on a particular OS, answering a question related to the project (either within an issue or discussion), or filing a very detailed bug report that helps speed up the fixing process. These are all the small things that can go a long way.
Contributions to H2O Wave
As mentioned in the title, H2O Wave is also participating in Hacktoberfest 2022.
There are 2 ways one can contribute, usually depending on the skillset:
- Main Wave repo — primarily for software developers and people wanting to contribute to docs (label: good first issue).
- Wave apps repo — primarily for Data Science & Machine Learning people who would like to showcase their Wave apps (label: hacktoberfest).
We kindly ask you to review contribution guidelines first, then comment on the issue you would like to work on to check whether there is anyone already working on it. For more info, have a look at this umbrella issue.
Let’s make this a habit, not a one-time thing
Although getting a T-shirt is nice (I have 2 already), let’s not forget that this should not be the main motivation. The goal here is to support open-source and learn a few things along the way.
Ready, steady, code! 🙂
