I've got a badge for "successfully" participating in the Hacktoberfest this year. Yeah, go check my profile. This means two things: not only I submitted at least four PR explicitly tagged for the Hacktoberfest, I also explicitly applied for the badge here on Dev. Double shame for me. Why?
Well, pretty much everything there's to say about Hacktoberfest was already said October 1st. And I agree with almost all of it. More than that, my own participation is an example of Hacktoberfest fraud.
First and foremost, I'm not an Open Source contributor. By far the most of code I write I write for my job and it's closed and proprietary. Thus the best thing I can do for Open Source is to just change my job to writing Open Source code full time for another company that pays for it. And frankly speaking I can do that. But I don't. So my "contribution" in Hacktoberfest is a mockery from the beginning.
Continuing the same reasoning the very idea underlining Hacktoberfest — the idea that four PRs you make over four weekends makes a difference for the Open Source — is kinda joke for the people writing Open Source full-time, 40 or more hours a week every week of every month. Especially the ones making a leaving out of it. Twice so for ones struggling to make a leaving out of Open Source.
Speaking of my actual "contributions", only two of my PRs were to someone else's repository, and that were adding just two references to a sort of "awesome list" of technical books. Another four PRs were to my own repository I've made during Hacktoberfest adding four small features each with a separate PR. If that's not a fraud that's an embarrassment for sure.
And now I'm waiting for my new shiny Hacktoberfest t-shirt, while actual Open Source contributors wait for nothing and just continue writing, testing, debugging and publishing their code as they did years before and going to do the years to come...
Top comments (0)