Four years of Hacktoberfest

27 Apr 2021

Hacktoberfest is a month-long initiative where people are encouraged to contribute to open source software. The rules are that if you do four pull requests on GitHub during the month you beat the challenge and win a t-shirt. Since I have participated and managed to do this four years in a row, from 2016 to 2019, I wanted to look back on how I actually managed to do it. I have broken down the challenges by each year.

2016

This year was quite easy. I did all four PRs for get-flash-videos, a project I had been using and contributing to before.

2017

This year, I did four PRs in four different projects (1, 2, 3, 4). One was for get-flash-videos but the other three were for projects I was using personally or wanted to try out.

2018

This year I did a lot of PRs since Brayns, the software I was working full-time on, is hosted on GitHub.

2019

This year three PRs were done for vcpkg, and one for glbinding. The fixes in vcpkg were for packages I was using and the PR in glbinding was just a documentation fix.

So, what can we learn from this? I believe we can conclude that the way I managed to complete these challenges and contribute was simply by using said software enough to find the bugs and fix them. For me, these years of Hacktoberfest has been a nice way of pushing myself to do some free software contributions.