Some Ways to Finish Hacktoberfest 2017
There’s five days left to participate in Hacktoberfest. For me, Hacktoberfest is a reminder of just how much I owe to the open source community. Every day for work, I use all the following to earn a living:
apache, composer, debian, docker, fira sans, firefox, franz, git, laravel, lilyterm, mariadb, node, npm, php, postfix, postgresql, ripgrep, sass, tig, tmux, vim, vue
Come Hacktoberfest, I usually just feel guilty that I haven’t done more to help these projects and the greater community. Here’s some alternative suggestions for people to get started or get their last pull request in before the end of the month, beyond just flipping through the issues on Github.
If you’re not comfortable with pull requests
These are all repos for people who just want to go through the steps and get a sense of how to do it:
- alicewonderland/hacktoberfest
- StevenCopeland/first-timers-hacktoberfest
- Roshanjossey/first-contributions
Slightly different, BlakeGuilloud/ganon is a repo where they’re building utilities in JavaScript for Hacktoberfest; still aimed at people who are new to the process.
If you are comfortable with pull requests
- Look back at the last few projects you’ve used, and see if any of their documentation was lacking, or whether they’d benefit from some examples.
- Look for a small project on Github in a language you’re proficient in, and sweep through some files and code review it. Even simple stuff like formatting to match a standard is helpful. For example, change some PHP to match PSR-1 and PSR-2. Update a simple Vue component to fit the vue style guide.
- Port a color scheme or a color scheme template. Last year, I made some templates for base16.
There’s a big difference between participating a little and not participating at all. Not everyone who uses open source has the expertise to contribute to it. But, if you have a Github account and you’re reading articles on Medium, you have the expertise. You can contribute. People will thank you for helping out. What’s more, you’ll even get stickers and a t-shirt out of it.
