JuniorDev Does Hacktoberfest — back for 2019!
On October 5th we hosted simulatneous Hacktoberfest events in both Melbourne and Perth! That’s right — JuniorDev’s Hacktoberfest events have gone coast-to-coast!
We had the pleasure of hosting our Melbourne event at IRESS’ office, while our Perth event was at Microsoft. For the rest of this post, we’ll be covering our Melbourne event, which apart from a minor blip with our WiFi (thanks to everyone for using their hotspots 🙌), the event was a roaring success!
In Melbourne this year we worked on our halloween-themed HacktoberFEST Halloween Graffiti website, which has received over 100 Pull Requests at the time of writing! 🤯
Participants were encouraged to submit a Pull Request with their own page, and we received a fantastic collection of different pages — from dancing skeletons to calculators that determine your “spookyness” level.
The Open Pixel Art project from Twilio also proved popular, as well as people’s personal projects and other open source projects.
This year we also strived to make the event as approachable as possible for people who were totally new to git and open source. David James and Tali ran a fantastic “Introduction to git” workshop — helping people learn and install git, create a GitHub account and open their first Pull Request.
Using source control for your first time can be really full-on, so we hope having this small group and more personal presentation made it easier for people to get up to speed.
At the conclusion of the day we were able to raffle off some prizes that were generously shipped to us by DigitalOcean. We used the fantastic Wheel of Names to select random participants to win some swag, including a very special set of of Sammy the Shark slippers! 🦈
A tremendous thanks to DigitalOcean, The Practical Developer and GitHub for once again organising Hacktoberfest, to all the volounteers and members of the JuniorDev crew, and most of all — to the attendees!
Sidenote: a photo from our first Hacktoberfest in 2017 event was actually featured on the official Hacktoberfest website! If you’re interested, you can read more about that event here.
See you in 2020 ✌️
