JuniorDev Does Hacktoberfest: Diving into Open Source
In October last year I had the pleasure of organising “JuniorDev Does Hacktoberfest” with the JuniorDev meetup group. This was a workshop-style meetup in which attendees participated in Hacktoberfest, an annual initiative put on by DigitalOcean and GitHub which encourages users to contribute 4 Pull Requests to Open Source in the month of October — then they’re rewarded with a free T-Shirt!
We held the event in the Xero accounting app Melbourne office on October 25 — which we hoped would allow participants to submit their 4 Pull Requests before the October 31 deadline.
We worked towards creating an inclusive event that emphasised collaboration and interaction amongst all the devs, so they could meet each other and share their knowledge with those that they felt comfortable to do so.
For many of the attendees, it was their first time ever contributing to Open Source, and the vibe in the room was absolutely electric! It was incredibly rewarding to see people use Git for the first time, as well as seeing experienced Git users make their first contribution to a public open source project.
I personally felt it incredibly daunting commiting to a public repository for the first time, so if we can help people take that first step then hopefully they’ll feel much more confident contributing to Open Source projects in the future.
I was blown away by the enthusiasm in the room from both the attendees and the mentors, for who I am incredibly thankful for. Some of my close friends and colleagues came out in numbers to help out at the event — experts in JavaScript, Python, .Net and a wide array of other technologies were able to help guide them through the process of using Git and answer their technical questions.
Whilst frontend technologies like JavaScript, HTML and CSS were well represented in the contributions, there were also people looking at Ruby, Python, Markdown and even translating documentation into foreign languages! And let’s not forgot all the emoji that were added to Repos all over GitHub 👏🎨💯
A popular project that attendees worked on was the JuniorDev community website. Attendees flexed their frontend skills and added graphics, animations and helped to reword the information present on the site.
Huge thanks to Xero for sponsoring the food and venue, and special thanks to DigitalOcean and GitHub for shipping us the swag and putting on the event!
Last but not least, it wouldn’t be a Hacktoberfest blog post without some swag! Here’s the awesome T-Shirt that participants received for all their hard work 👌
