What is Hacktoberfest? It is a worldwide event held in October encouraging developers to contribute to open source projects. Open source is the future. A diversity of people contributing to a project far exceeds the minds of few.
Open Source
Open source creates modularised projects, intended to be used and duplicated by many. Organisations and individuals can focus their efforts on better things that matter.
How many times have you used a free service or application that you just can’t live without? Developing would be nothing as it is now without open source. Imagine paying a sum of money for each tool that you use, every library, every IDE, imagine paying each time to use WWW.
Open source grants people freedom.
In 2020, I aim to contribute more to open source projects. Hacktoberfest fest is a great way to get started, and to break down the initial fear of making contributions. But I believe it should be all year round. There are many open source tools that I use on a daily basis, that I would love to contribute and make improvements little by little.
Many companies are opening up to open source. With a large part of their code exposed, you are able to find improvements to their code. Often you will find they will have a list of issues that they would like the open source community to resolve. It benefits the open source community, and it’s a free source of labour for the company, win win.
Furthermore, if you are really engaged with one companies open source projects, you find yourself enjoying the feedback, and playing with their codebase, you can even apply to work for them, you are essentially doing it anyway. If the company enjoys your work, they will be very inclined to bringing you on. What better way to show you are a good candidate, by already working for them.
A little goes a long way.