This year marks my first year in participating in annual Hacktoberfest event. I actually already knew about this event several years ago, but still haven't got the guts to participate until this year. Totally wasted chances if I should say now.

But this year, on October 3, I finally completed all the four accepted-PR challenges, and I'm feeling so happy to be able to take a part in this event (and completed the challenges).

For this year's Hacktoberfest, I register myself both as a Participant & a Maintainer. This is totally doable if you have some public repositories you can offer, but also want to contribute to another great open source projects as well.

One night before, the October 2nd 🌜

It was another Saturday night for me, nothing big was really happening here. Except, I cannot sleep due to too much coffee I drank earlier at the evening, and it was already 12AM. Everyone was already asleep but me.

I decided to turn on my laptop to check the issues on an amazing open source project I'm currently contributing since last month, and also exploring the Github if there are some interesting projects I can contribute.

About the project, I'm going to write the details in the upcoming notes.

I spent some hours to squash as many bugs as I can, and submit the PRs.

In the next evening, an email was popping up in my phone screen.

Wait, did I really make it? I can't believe what I read, then I navigated to my profile in the Hacktoberfest page, and here's what I found.

I guess it's true now that I completed the challenges on day 3. Not only four, but five accepted PRs 🔥🔥🔥 I only need to wait for the 14-days maturing state to make my PRs valid.

But I won't stop here. I'll keep contributing since swags are not my main goal. It's for greater good.

My strategy to finish it early 🛠️

I believe that everything needs a careful planning and strategy, and so does Hacktoberfest. And since this is my first Hacktoberfest, I need to plan it even more carefully.

As I mentioned earlier in this note, I started to contribute at September. I clearly understand, all contributions before October 1st will not be counted. But that's okay because that was not my goal. By starting it early, you build the communication to gain the trust from the project's maintainer, so your next PR will more likely to be accepted. The project's Maintainer will also know that you are not coming just for the event. So when October 1st is finally coming, you already know which project you can contribute to, and already understand how the codes are written.

What if I ran out of issues? 💡

My 10+ years of experience in software development has taught me that the amount of bugs will never reach zero (unless it's just a hello world). There are always rooms for improvements.

Easiest example, your operating system (in your PC/laptop and smartphone) will download and install updates periodically.

If you don't see any issue in an open source project, but you know some other things to improve, you can communicate it with the project's Maintainer either by submitting an issue, or by sending them an email.

That's the strategy, building good communication to gain the trust.

You can do more 💪😎

If you aim only for the swags, you'll more likely to stop at your 4th or 5th PR. It's not wrong to aim for the rewards, but you can do more than that.

I know contributing to open source is not an easy task, but the world needs your contribution, and I believe you can do it.

If you are a beginner/newcomer, use this month as a chance to prove yourself that you are a good software developer, and put the results in your portfolio.

Submit quality PRs as many as you can, and believe in yourself that you can do more 💪😎

Happy hacking!