1y ago

Hacktoberfest 2023: My comeback to Open Source!

dev.to Hacktoberfest 2023: My comeback to Open Source!

Intro Time's up! October will end soon and it's time for me to write down how this month...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7401258 As a comment advised me to :)

Hello folks!
I was going to post my blog post on Reddit and I discovered Lemmy :) It seemed like a warmer place so I just post it there!
In this blog post I wrote about my experience as a first-time maintainer and a first-time participant of Hacktoberfest. In the future, I am seriously considering contributing to Bevy and/or Lemmy!

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10 comments

Nice that someone's happy about it. As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I gave up this year because it's gone downhill.
- Gave up being a contributor and maintainer?
  
  I still do both (and did before), but now just don't bother with Hacktoberfest.
  
  Hacktoberfest always seemed a bit gimmicky, but it seemed to help, so I never say anything.
  It's cool that you continue to contribute on your own!
- I am interested by your experience, do you mean the fact they stopped shipping physical goodies was a deal-breaker? Or is it more general?
  
  I might be the minority who was affected by this but how they handled the physical goodies last year was the last straw for me. Unlike all the spammy contributions that rush to it, I didn't rush creating some pointless PRs on the first day or whatever. My last PR finished its embargo period a few days before the end of October. They even sent out a congratulations email, but when I clicked the link and went to the website there wasn't anything there. Only when I checked their discord, I saw others with the same confusion and someone semi-officially saying they might've run out. It's obvious they didn't even ever consider running out and had no system in place to handle that.
  Other than that, some of the rules they introduced in recent years were also so detrimental to meaningful PRs even though they thought it'd motivate that, instead of spammy PRs. Clearly that didn't work at all and actually had the opposite effect in some cases. It was a lot easier to get spammy PRs counted than meaningful ones.
  I could rant in more detail about the latter if you're interested, but I'll refrain right now.
- I'm confused, what exactly is going downhill? Hacktoberfest, or open source in general?
  
  Hacktoberfest.

10 comments