Hi I am Pat, and this year is my first #hacktoberfest. From the title, I sound like a #hacktoberfest villain, don't I?

SPOILER ALERT: I am not :).

This year, I started getting active on github and the DEV community because of my learning goals. With that, I also learned about a lot of dev events, one of which, #hacktoberfest.

I decided to enter out of curiosity, exploring a lot of projects with the good first issue tag to get the hang of it. Finding issues was easy, the problem was, I got a bit late and almost all of them are dibbed/taken already. It was fine. The bad part was some contributors were commenting on threads, messaging the maintainers to accept the PRs. Sometimes requesting these maintainers to add the #hacktoberfest tag for the request to be counted in their #hacktoberfest participation tally. It kind of feels off because it seems to me that the desire to contribute stemmed from the acquisition of a badge after the event and not the genuine desire of contributing to the open source community.

I reflected on this first #hacktoberfest experience and realized that if I want to successfully complete the event, I have to be actively exploring the open source community not just during October. Finding issues is very easy to do, but familiarizing with how an open source project work, reading the contributor guidelines carefully, setting up local development, analyzing the open issue, etc. take time. Completing issues that are not menial requires preparation.

If I have one suggestion for myself next year, that is, explore fun/interesting open-source projects in advance, start contributing, familiarize with the contributor's guidelines and the open issues. And I feel like hacktoberfest will be completed in a breeze that way.

I can say I failed my first hacktoberfest, but I think the experience served me well.

Happy hacking!