Hacktoberfest 2020 Recap

With October ending in a few short hours, I thought I would summarize my overall experience of this year’s Hacktoberfest. 2020 is a wild year, full of ups and downs, and when you thought you’ve seen it all — you haven’t. That last part is especially true when I look at myself over the course of this month. With exams, labs, workshops, exercises, lectures, readings, and Hacktoberfest entries all due one after the other, I can truthfully say it was a stressful month — a month that I thought I wouldn’t get through in one piece. Yet here I am with everything submitted. I feel like this was a period of growth for me, I went against my fears entry after entry and managed to submit four pull requests; Discord bot README.md, Flutter redesign, style reformatting, and adding an argparse article to FlashReads. I feel like I’ve matured as a developer by being able to now professionally contribute to open source repositories that I may find in the future. I feel that I am more confident when it comes to interacting with other developers online. I feel that I am finally reaching the goals that I set for myself when I started my software development journey.

To anybody who ends up reading about my dive into the world of open source software, learn from me: don’t be scared of contributing to other’s projects, don’t be scared to collaborate and work with other developers, and most of all, don’t be offended when someone critiques your work — it’s the only way we get better.