And we should all be excited (and cool, everybody be cool…)

It’s October 1. And all through the repositories.. a cold shiver has (maybe) gone down the spines of maintainers everywhere. There’s a storm on the horizon. The hordes are coming. Hacktoberfest has begun.

And to be honest, that’s a real bummer to me. If I look back to my first(ish?) pull request, when and where did it come from?

Hacktoberfest.

So for me, this event will always hold a special place in my heart. Why? Because it’s one of those things that helped me figure out “oh, that silly little fix is important”. Prior to this, I had always just been a consumer of open source projects. I’d type away into GitHub issues and beg for help. Why? Because I was still learning how to navigate within the ecosystem. Crafting a PR was intimidating. Was my change important enough? Was it even correct? Probably not, I’m sure someone else will get to it.

But with the nudge of Hacktoberfest, it suddenly didn’t seem so scary. Was it the gamification? Was it the swag? I’m sure a bit of both had caught my interest, but suddenly I was a lot less self-conscious (and a lot more focused on filling the meter). But, looking back, the benefit here was that it encouraged me to open up pull requests. And looking back, the real value wasn’t even any of the above. It was learning how to go through the PR process. It was learning about working with upstream maintainers. And maybe even more personally, it was figuring out that not all feedback needed to hurt.

So to me, this is always how I’ll remember Hacktoberfest. As a month that has the potential to change folks lives. From that first PR, I managed to open quite a few many more. I’ve gotten new jobs off the back of that PR. I’ve met friends living all across the world. I can attribute a ton of forward momentum in my life directly to that moment. All I needed was that first push.

Up Next: An Avalanche

And of course, as with every coin, there is another side to consider. While I’m very sure I am not alone in the story I’ve told above, there are of course some negatives that have come along with it. While this annual event has certainly been great at driving contributions (apparently, people love(d) t-shirts), it also has a tendency to overwhelm already weary maintainers on small and large projects alike.

These projects, who in most cases would love the help, once a year find themselves facing an avalanche of issues and pull requests. And in some cases, it’s not exactly the additive contribution that they are looking for. In some cases, it’s just changing the order of words in a sentence or adding some unnecessary punctuation. All just to increase their contribution count.

This is not the way.

To be fair, as years have gone by, Hacktoberfest organizers have come up with better ways to help discourage this type of behavior. Instead of it being a free-for-all, things now are a bit more opt-in. In addition to this, maintainers have a few more tools at their disposal to mark this type of undesirable behavior. While I’m not sure exactly how many folks do this level of spelunking, if thorough enough it would certainly be possible to link someone back to their undesirable behavior during Hacktoberfest. So beware, your reputation is likely to follow you around depending on how you decide to act during this most code-filled of months, for better or for worse.

On the flip side though, as a maintainer I’ve tried to look at Hacktoberfest through a slightly different lens. Instead of seeing it as a burden to be overcome, I see it as a potential set of signals. While there are always going to be folks just looking to pump their numbers, I think the majority of folks are just looking for the right on-ramp. If I’m getting bad PRs or Issues, maybe those signals are telling me that some work is needed to make that on-ramp more approachable. So what if Hacktoberfest was instead an exercise in sanding down sharp edges. Work on making that CONTRIBUTING.md a little easier to interpret. Write up something that looks like My First PR. What I’ve come to find is that if we make the desired behavior the easy behavior, you tend to get where you want a lot faster.

Go Forth, Together

So my advice to everyone? Lean in. Everyone be cool, but the only way to proceed is together. The only way we continue to grow this ecosystem that we all love is by encouraging others to get involved and showing them the ropes.

So go forth. Be excellent to each other and enjoy your Hacktobering.