Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!

October 31, 2019 Antti K. Koskela

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I generally work in proprietary – that is, non-open-source – projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it's usually for a hobby. To me, Hacktoberfests are a great diversion from that, and kind of an opportunity to find an excuse to do something a bit different.

This time around, I've been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby – so it's not like I was sleeping anyway. I was able to submit a few useful scripts, bugfixes and documentation improvements during the small hours, or sometimes during the day since I wasn't working, either (both Canada and Finland have decent paternity leaves).

This year, I was working for the whole month – and it's been pretty hectic! While I could luckily contribute a couple of small pull requests to an open-source library we use internally, even that was mostly on my own time. A lot of people simply don't get paid to do OSS :)

On a related, absolute but temporary tangent, this means anytime someone suggests a GitHub profile is a sufficient, or even a good way to measure someone's worthiness as a programmer, I get rather annoyed. It's such a privileged, narrow-minded point of view, that just betrays how little the person actually understands anything outside their little bubble.

Anyway – I took a few days off work, and actually had the time to submit a few pull requests! For someone, that is STILL not really taking part in Open-Source, or even used GitHub that much, I'm happy to limp through once again 😅

And yeah, the irony is not lost on me: being financially so stable, that I'm able to take some time off just to have hobbies and take part in a coding challenge is also pretty darn privileged!

But, then again, the joke's on you – it's time-in-lieu, so I actually still got paid, I just had to work overtime for the whole September to accrue the hours... Anyway, enough with checking the privileges, back to the topic!

My pull requests this Hacktober

I'm just returning to (almost) daily programming work after a couple of years of DevOps-by-proxy debugging, figuring out why Azure AD isn't letting users log in, and managing backlogs on the side. I did code 60 hours per week for the whole September to make a deadline – and that was a great crash course back to programming!

This year I could grab some of the tiny features and bugfixes we've implemented internally to MatBlazorand modify them to actually work for the library that's available publicly – and that produced a few small Pull Requests:

However, I wasn't quite happy with just that – during the hectic and somewhat painful project that's kind of still going on, a major pain point was getting the Azure DevOps pipelines to work the way we wanted to – and that was in part due to misleading, outdated or just not comprehensive enough documentation. Luckily, it's almost all open-sourced nowadays – so I could try and fix it myself! :)

Ok, ok – admittedly, I did take the chance to post a few blog articles myself, too! But everything generic enough to share on docs.microsoft.com, I submitted as a Pull Request. See below:

Ok – stop laughing at the "fixes the broken line breaks" already! That stuff really bothers me, so of course I'd fix it. 🧐

So, once again – huge thanks to DigitalOcean and DEV for the challenge. I appreciate the little bit of extra encouragement to make people (myself included) contribute whatever they can!

As a side note – really looking forward to the T-shirt! Having participated in a few different hackathons and challenges, the only organizer that ever actually DID send me the t-shirt was DigitalOcean! 😂 Appreciate it, folks.

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