I got an email informing me that I’ve earned a Hacktoberfest t-shirt! Woo!

I did Hacktoberfest because I wanted to contribute to open source projects; the t-shirt was just a nice motivator to put a time limit on it. Here’s what I learned:

  • Most people are incredibly grateful for any help you can give them! If you want to help a project but aren’t sure if you can make a worthwhile contribution, see if you can make a small contribution - fixing tiny bugs, typos, documentation updates; I promise that these things are more appreciated than you realise.

  • 0-5 pull requests in a month is a lot. If you’re already involved in a project, it’s probably not that much, but when you’re trying to get into it, it’s a surprising amount, so don’t feel bad about starting slowly.

  • It forces you to do your best. It’s pretty simple - you know that people are going to be looking at your code and judging it, so you try hard to make it clean, readable, and correct. That’s good practice. Don’t worry too much about being judged, though - people are mostly very supportive and will help you improve things that could be better. It’s a good way to grow.

There are no t-shirts on the go right now, but you should still get involved in open source.