The One About Hacktoberfest • Shannon Crabill

Ahh, fall. The season of PSLs, cozy sweaters and…Hacktoberfest?

A portmanteau of “hack” (think, “hackathon”) and “Octoberfest”, “Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software”. The idea is simple. Contribute to any public repository on Github in the month of October and you get stickers. Make four pull requests and you’ll get a t-shirt!

Freebies aside, I loved the idea.

I searched for open issues on Github and at first found it difficult to find something I could work on. Either I was not familiar with that code language or someone else beat me to fix. I eventually did find some projects to contribute to (yay for translations!) but wanted to see how else I could give back to the open source community and other newer coders.

So I pushed one of my projects to Github for anyone to contribute to.

I learned Javascript over the summer. To practice, I created a countdown timer to Halloween. What better project to add to the Hacktoberfest fun?!

[caption id=“attachment_163” align=“alignnone” width=“525”] The first version of my “How Many Days Until Halloween?” web page[/caption]

In posting this project I wanted to get something out of it too. I had never merged commits other than my own. I was looking forward to reviewing pull requests, merge conflicts and (hopefully) not break anything in the process. Git is not something I use every day

It’s been a week since I posted “How Many Days Until Halloween?” to Github and the response has been great so far! I’ve gone from having a relatively static page to one with random, spooky text, flying bats, and a happy little pumpkin favicon.

[caption id=“attachment_164” align=“alignnone” width=“525”] Stats after one week of posting my project to Github[/caption]

If you want to get into the Hacktoberfest spirit, the repo for this project can be found here. Stay spooky!

Photo by Andrew Small on Unsplash