Our Experience with Hacktoberfest
That’s right! We organized our 1st Hacktoberfest :)
We are still a relatively small team, around 11 engineers, but we are growing (and hiring) at a reasonable pace now. And, we all know that with “relatively big” teams comes “relatively big” responsibilities: Giving back to the community!
Joking aside, this is something we have been wanting to do for some time and we finally have the manpower to put some of these projects in motion.
So, after dipping our toe into the open-source events by sponsoring and helping our team member @josepostiga to organize the first Laravel Portugal meetup, we gave it a shot and organized our first company-wide open source event.
The experience was really rewarding and everyone enjoyed a more relaxed day, away from sprints and deadlines, to do what every developer likes to do: solving problems and improving things.
We started by creating a spreadsheet of all the improvements that we would like to do for Open Source projects. This also allowed people without any project to team up with someone.
This generated a lot of brainstorming, pair programming and, of course, a few beers. But at the end of the day, we were able to submit 4 pull requests and have another one under development. These contributions were distributed between the Laravel framework and some packages that we use on our backend and frontend.
Of course, we tracked our contributions using the good old fashion post-its.
Pull requests:
- laravel/framework — [6.x] Simplify gatherKeysByType method — [Merged]
- laravel/framework — [6.x] Add ValidateJson middleware #5127 — [Rejected] (We will turn this into a package)
- laravel-notification-channels/channels — First version of Workplace channel #66 — [Open]
- spatie/laravel-permission — Add timestamps columns to pivot tables #1240 — [Open]
Under development:
- storybookjs/storybook — CLI option to load stories from specified directories #8247
Let’s now try to keep the momentum going and make the effort to do more contributions like this to the community.
My take on this, personally, is that contributing to open source takes some time and effort, and developers rarely think about it, although many of us depend on it. But it’s also really fun and by actively digging into it do we truly value its importance. So it’s something that every team should try to incorporate in their mindset as much as possible.
