As Hacktoberfest comes to a close, looking back it was pretty good. I wish I could do this under better circumstances. With additional course load than normal, midterms and some personal life stuff I was under more time crunch than usual.

My approach for the hacktoberfest was to try new tech that I'm not familiar with. The lead to me working in some python repos as well. If I had more time I would've tried some rust repos as well. Since in the beginning I saw some rust issues that looked simple but since I would have to learn a new language I was reluctant on taking those on. But I would say I did get to try some new things specifically in python. It was nice learning how differently projects can be set up and how complicated some of them can be depending on the project size.

Since the beginning the problem was finding issues to work on. I was also kind of picky about my issues. I wanted to work on applications/tools that are actually used by people with a high fork count. I did not want to work on repos that are not maintained. Moreover, I was looking for issues specifically labelled Hacktober and I must be honest that label is a bloated. Almost half of the issues are either for repos that was made two weeks ago specifically for hacktoberfest. Although in the beginning there was a lot of issues but just a week in the label became so bloated. In the future, I would just look for issues that are labelled good first issues. Something I did for my last week since I literally went to page 100 of hacktober label. And there are actual repos with legitimate issues.

Most surprising part was how nice some people were. Although there was some waiting to be done at times, overall everyone was very nice as my professor mentioned. Although I did get ignored for one of the issues. I made a PR and someone part of the repo just self assiged and made the same PR as me. I followed all the rules but still got ghosted. That was a bit discouraging. But overall everyone was super nice and it was fun actually contributing to real projects with a user base. 10/10 would do again.