Hacktoberfest: Part 1
Giving back for a great cause
Ushering in the fall season is something to celebrate for most. The cooler temperatures call for flannels, scarves, and other layers; events like The Christmas Market in Toronto appear; and for students like me, we scream not at the thought of Halloween, but Hacktoberfest.
What is Hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest is a yearly event that happens every October, where individuals from all across the world come together to help fix bugs on GitHub. It’s a fantastic event that encourages community, collaboration, and growth, whether you’re a beginner or a senior!
Check out the swag I received from last year’s event:
For more details on Hacktoberfest, look here!
Finding A Project
This time around, I sought out smaller projects — ones that need some love, but might not be easily visible. Having enjoyed working with Go during my summer internship, I was like “Hey, let’s look for a smaller project that uses Go!”
And so with a quick search on Google for Hacktoberfest golang, I came across an individual’s Dev.TO post asking for some help on their project:
Choosing a Feature
The great thing about this project was that it was still fairly new and a lot of features still needed to be implemented — what better way to contribute and write code in Go, right?
And so, I took up a feature to check if an e-mail address has been pwned. haveibeenpwned.com was developed by Troy Hunt in order to give users a quick way of checking if their information had been previously compromised. All it takes is a quick search:
Submitting a Fix
With a quick call to the haveibeenpwned API, I submitted my PR the same day:
The next morning, I woke up to a purple merged symbol from the core maintainer 🎉:
Final Thoughts
Giving back to the community is something that I will never stop doing. There has been a single scenario that hasn’t pushed me in some way, shape or form, and for that, I’m grateful. Coincidentally, today is Thanksgiving for us here in Canada. It’s a time where we give thanks and appreciation for those in our lives. For me, I’m thankful for those that invested their time into me and also sacrificed so much for me to be where I am today. It’s why I truly believe so much in Hacktoberfest.
Cheers,
Sean 👨🏽💻
