Good morning!
I don’t write many posts for LinkedIn, however today I’m excited to talk a little about Hacktoberfest and Rocky Linux.
First of all, what is “Hacktoberfest?”
Hacktoberfest is a yearly event sponsored primarily by DigitalOcean. It seeks to attract as many people as possible to open source projects for the purpose of making contributions. Many contributors are naturally programmers like myself, but there are also numerous “no-code” opportunities. Even fixing simple typos can help a project that is strapped for resources. In that sense, there’s a little something for everyone regardless of their technical expertise.
Why am I participating?
I have three reasons for participating: first, to gain more experience with open source development; second, to improve my skills; and finally, to have fun!
I have been an advocate for free and open source software for years, and an open source user for a lot longer. This felt like the perfect moment to start giving something back. Contributing to bigger projects is an idea I’ve had for a long time, and Hacktoberfest provided an opportunity for me to motivate myself in a novel way. Hacktoberfest also represents an opportunity to get some experience navigating a variety of codebases or working with different programming languages. Last (but of course not least!), I wanted to have some fun participating in the open source community.
Is it your first time?
Yes! While I was going back to school the last few years I always felt like I was too busy to accomplish anything meaningful for an event like Hacktoberfest. It turns out that couldn’t be further from the truth. If nothing else, Hacktoberfest can be a low stress way to give back to the open source maintainers who give their time and talent to make software better for us all. So I sincerely encourage everyone interested to sign up as well.
What are you hoping to learn/What have you learned already?
As noted above, my primary goals are to improve my technical skills. In addition, I also want to improve some of my soft skills. However, I wasn’t thinking of soft skills in the usual sense. I went into Hacktoberfest looking to become more accustomed to working with other developers. I’m hoping to understand pull request etiquette more, and generally become familiar with communicating with my peers.
Why did I participate with Rocky Linux?
I have been using Rocky Linux on my home server since the first release. I even have a Rocky Linux “Early Adopter” t-shirt from when they were first looking for funding. In short, I found that Rocky’s values aligned my own. Per their Community Charter, “We do not assume the open source mindset lightly. It is not a marketing tool, or a business endeavor. Open source is a development model designed to engage and foster collaboration and usage.” In other words, I also firmly believe that open collaboration is critical to moving forward with any technical or scientific endeavor.
#Hacktoberfest #RockyCommunity
