Hacktoberfest 2018

This post is serving as my fifth and final (required) open source Pull Request for Hacktoberfest 2018. This method of getting my final Pull Request is a little out of the spirit of Hacktoberfest, but I am excited that it is serving as an opportunity to post for the first time in years.

Unfortunately, if you look at my blog's PR history it seems I've used this trick in previous years:

Last year, I used Hacktoberfest as an excuse to fix some long-standing bugs in my Git version bumping CLI. This also felt a little out of the spirit, but I felt better that it was at least code.

This year, I am happy that four out of five of my Pull Requests are the result of contributing to someone else's open source project!

Last night, panicked at the thought of not getting a sweet, free shirt, I began playing with Hactoberfest's saved GitHub search for languages I use, like, and am proficient with. Due to the time crunch, I chose to mostly focus on Ruby repositories.

After jumping around search result pages I eventually found some issues for the rubyforgood/partner repo. I was initially drawn to the open-ended issues like code refactoring and add tests because I thought this would mean there would be multiple PR opportunities (and that was correct!). Fortunately, my selfish side brought me to a project that seems like it's quite unselfish. From the README:

This is the companion application to the diaper app. The diaper app is an inventory management system and this partner application handles the onboarding, approving, and handling of requests from diaper banks from their partners. Diaper banks do not distribute diapers directly to the public, instead they distribute diapers to partners like women's shelters, food pantries, homeless shelters, and other organizations.

I feel very fortunate to have a project that I can be proud to have contributed to.

Interested in what I ended up doing? Check out my PRs here.

Next Year?

I definitely plan to participate in Hacktoberfest 2019, and I hope my future-self starts earlier next year.

I would like to use Hacktoberfest as a way to play with languages I want to learn or get better with. I think starting sooner will make it easier to do this experiment. I may also try to knock out a few early wins, so I don't feel as much of a time crunch and can choose to work on a big issue or with a less familiar technology.

Share Your Contributions

Did you participate in Hacktoberfest this year or in years past? Please share your contribution in the comments! If you didn't contribute this year, please take a look at how simple my PRs are, and use it as motivation. You don't have to add some crazy large feature. I know from my day job that projects have a million little annoyances that are hard to make time to fix, so while a PR may be small it helps clear away just a little more cruft for the maintainers.