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My Experience as an Open-source Project Maintainer at Hacktoberfest by Sanket Borade

My Experience as an Open-source Project Maintainer at Hacktoberfest by Sanket Borade

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Sanket Borade
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4 min read

A. Introduction:

In this blog post, I’d like to share my experience as an open-source project maintainer in HacktoberFest 2022 to offer insights and advice to others who are interested in maintaining open-source projects.

I’ll discuss some of the key lessons I’ve learned as a maintainer, and share some tips and best practices that I’ve found to be effective. Whether you’re a new contributor to open-source projects or an experienced maintainer, I hope you’ll find this blog post informative and engaging.

I know, Open-Source sounds pretty overwhelming for beginners. Thanks to Hacktoberfest, thousands of people are was successfully able to contribute and maintain open-source repositories.

But what is Hacktoberfest you may ask? Well, here we go!

B. What is a Hacktoberfest exactly?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of Open Source by Digital Ocean, and sponsors like Docker & App-Write. Hacktoberfest is all about Open Source, and it encourages participation in giving back to the open-source community. Developers, Designers, and Technical writers get involved in open- source by completing pull requests, participating in events, and much more!

C. My Personal Experience

Not only did I contribute to some fantastic projects, including Appwrite’s codebase and Docker’s documentation, but I also had the privilege of serving as a project maintainer for my seven projects.

My journey as a project maintainer started here in Hacktoberfest 2022. Later, I became project mentor in CodePeak and SWOC too. Altogether, I worked with 136 contributors and helped them close 221 issues, receive 284 MRs, and earned 62 stars and 212 forks.

I loved collaborating with such a talented developers and designers and being able to facilitate their contributions.

If you’re interested in seeing the repositories, I maintained during Hacktoberfest 2022 and CodePeak 2023, you can find them in this list.

D. Why to be an open-source project maintainer?

Being a project maintainer in Hacktoberfest can be a valuable learning experience, both in terms of technical skills and interpersonal skills. Here are some things you might learn from being a project maintainer in Hacktoberfest:

  1. Time management: As a project maintainer, you will likely receive a lot of pull requests and issues during Hacktoberfest. Learning to manage your time effectively and prioritize which issues and pull requests to work on first can be a valuable skill.
  2. Collaboration and communication: You will be working with contributors from all over the world. Learning to effectively communicate with contributors and collaborate on code can help you build better relationships with your team members in corporate world in future.
  3. Technical skills: By reviewing pull requests and issues, you may learn about new technologies and techniques that you haven’t used before.
  4. Community building: As a project maintainer, you have the opportunity to create a positive and inclusive community around your project. Especially, with new Discussion feature.
  5. Open-source best practices: Hacktoberfest is a great opportunity to learn about best practices in open-source development, such as code reviews, documentation, and testing.

D. Lessons I learned:

  1. The importance of clear contribution guidelines:

I received contributions from a variety of contributors including first time contributors to seasoned contributors. This experience showed me how important it is to have clear guidelines for contributors to follow. Writing a detailed and precise README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md files can be very helpful in making sure toto encourage high-quality contributions that align with your project’s goals.

Feel free to use these README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md files for reference.

2. The need for effective communication:

As a project maintainer, I had to communicate with a lot contributors to provide code feedback or answer the questions. This experience showed me how important it is to be responsive and clear in your communication to avoid misunderstandings or conflicts.

3. The challenge of managing multiple contributions:

I received a high volume of contributions on 7 projects and thus experienced the challenge of managing and reviewing them all. This was the most difficult task for me till GitHub Mobile App Acted as saviour for me.

4. The satisfaction of seeing your project grow:

Finally, as a project maintainer, I likely had the opportunity to see your project grow and improve thanks to the contributions I received during Hacktoberfest. This experience showed you how rewarding it can be to see the impact of your work and the contributions of others in building something bigger than yourself.

In conclusion, being a maintainer in Hacktoberfest has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I’ve had the opportunity to engage with a diverse group of contributors, learn about new technologies, and help improve open-source projects. I encourage everyone to get involved in open-source and participate in Hacktoberfest, whether it’s as a maintainer or contributor. Together, we can continue to make a positive impact on the global tech community.

Wait what did you say? You aren’t actively contributing to open-source.

F. Start now. I mean, NOW!

If you don't already contribute to open-source, start today, I mean like right NOW. Create a GitHub account, and start sending some Pull Requests.
Feel free to contribute to my repositories. I’m always up to help new contributors get started with open-source.

Thats all for today. I hope you learned something from this blog. I bet you’ll start Open Source now! Feel free to hit me on Twitter! See ya later .