My first Hacktoberfest. A month of open-source contributions, a few challenges, some rewards worth keeping, and a handful of lessons from shipping with a global community.
My Hacktoberfest Adventure
Holopin galore
Earning Holopin badges from sponsors like Appwrite, ILLA, MLH, DigitalOcean, and Hacktoberfest itself turned out to be a surprisingly good motivator. Each badge made a merged pull request feel like a small win worth keeping.
#30DaysOfOpenSource
Signing up for Depths’ challenge kept me going through the month and pointed me at projects I would not have found on my own.
HackSquad 2023
HackSquad put me on a team with people I had never met, all working toward the same goal. Strangers one week, teammates the next. Easily a highlight of the month.
Every good pull request is a step forward, for the project and for the person who shipped it.
Conquering the four PRs
I finished the four-pull-request challenge, and picked up a handful of projects interesting enough to keep supporting well past October.
Planting a tree
Alongside the code, the community planted trees through Tree-Nation. A small thing next to the pull requests, but a good one to be part of.
What I Learned
The badges and rewards were fun, but a few things stuck with me longer:
Open collaboration beats working alone. Reviewing other people's code, and having mine reviewed, taught me more than any solo project.
Small contributions add up. One merged fix looks tiny. A month of them changes what a project can do.
The hard parts are where you grow. The pull requests that made me want to give up are the ones I learned the most from.
If you have been thinking about Hacktoberfest, sign up next year. Pick one project and ship one real fix, then see where it takes you. That is how it started for me.