This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience

This month, I had the pleasure of diving into Hacktoberfest proactively with a few clear goals in mind.

Getting Started with Hacktoberfest 🎉

1️⃣ First, I wanted to discover the world of open source, as I’ve always admired the collaborative nature of these projects.

2️⃣ Secondly, I was motivated to contribute to projects that I personally use or find useful, because I believe in helping to maintain and improve projects that I hope will continue to be available to the community.

3️⃣ Finally, I saw Hacktoberfest as a great technical challenge. Working on real projects helps me learn faster, and solving real problems while getting feedback directly is the best way to improve my skills.

The Projects I Contributed To 🏗️

I chose two projects that intrigued me for different reasons:

Git Town

I initially started contributing to Git-Town by updating the documentation while trying to install it. 😅

Just after I noticed other issues that intrigued me and moved on to more complex tasks, specifically addressing breaking changes. This phase of my contribution was a highlight; I discussed with the project creator and one other maintainer on a way to implement these changes carefully, ensuring they were integrated in a way that minimized disruption to users. This allowed us to rapidly deploy the new release.

After theses changes, I was thrilled when the creator added me to the Git-Town organization on GitHub. This recognition gave me a real sense of achievement and encouraged me to continue contributing to this project.

You can find the project here 💚

Open Food Facts

I came across Open Food Facts while reading a blog post on project to contribute to during Hacktoberfest, and its public benefit and mission immediately resonated with me. It is a public database of food products from around the world, providing information on ingredients, nutrition, and environmental impact to help users make informed choices.

I chose to focus on updating the Node.js SDK by adding wrappers for the latest API endpoints, writing unit tests, improving CI/CD, and working towards automatic releases of new versions. Through this, I hope to support the project’s growth and stability, ensuring it’s reliable for anyone who wishes to use it to create projects that rely on Open Food Facts. There are often very good project ideas in the opensource world 🙂

You can find the project here 💚

Challenges and Learning Moments 🤗

The most challenging part of Hacktoberfest was getting started with each project. Understanding how the project works and integrating my contributions with the existing architecture required time and patience. It is important to minimize breaking changes wherever possible, which is often easier said than done.

Contributing to open source also reminds how to work asynchronously. Each contributor has their own schedule, and learning to adapt to different timelines and communicate effectively has been a valuable experience.

Looking Forward 🙌

My journey into open source was also made possible by my company, Zenika, which encourages us to engage with this ecosystem. Zenika has a dedicated website, oss.zenika.com, to support open-source involvement, and every October, we host events like live streams, meetups, and more to promote participation.

We also have a dedicated Github Organisation that can be useful if you’re interested in joining this ecosystem like this repository on how to promote Open Source Projects.

Hacktoberfest has left me with a sense of accomplishment and a desire to continue contributing to open-source. If you’re new to open source, I encourage you to explore the many resources available, from GitHub to community spaces like Discord, where you can connect with other contributors and learn more about active projects.

Open-source work is often done in people’s personal time, so it’s important to be proactive and patient. Maintainers and contributors may not always be immediately available. 🙌

Thank you for taking an interest in open source. Remember, there are likely more tools you use than you think that rely on open-source contributions 😄