🔧 2 weeks of Hacktoberfest as a first-time maintainer and contributor

While people enjoy the oncoming autumn, developers are psyched for a specific reason in October. It’s that time of the year again (Hacktober)! Hacktoberfest 2021 marks yet another year of celebrating open-source software. Celebrating open-source software for the entire month of October encourages people with all skill-set levels to try their hands on real-world software, contribute to the public repositories between October 1–31 and win some cool swaggers or goodies.

To participate in Hacktoberfest, you need to sign up for the event on the official website and can begin to create pull requests to any project that has a “Hacktoberfest” label on its issue tracker. You can also find projects by browsing through the Hacktoberfest site. Like ToolJet (yes, that’s us!, with 3.7k stars 😎), every valid Pull Request is eligible for ToolJet swag ( stickers, t-shirts, and more ), and selected top contributors will receive special surprise prizes.

I had never contributed to any open-source software before joining ToolJet. This year I found myself being a part of a team and maintaining specific aspects of the project, listing out Issues and trying to help other fellow developers with their queries. At some point, we could not even keep pace with the steep number of contributors picking up Issues and being bombarded with really overwhelming notifications, which was awed, happy, shocked (all at once). To put things into perspective, we had over 50 Pull Requests from 40+ new contributors; out of this, a good number of them were first-timers.

My preconceived notion that every contribution needed to be sizeable was shattered, seeing the sheer amount of responses. I turned into a contributor myself and contributed to a few projects (very few), some without the “Hacktoberfest” label. I finally started my stint in open sourcing!
No matter how big or small the contributions, we welcome you to collaborate and contribute, starting with fixing a bug, improving the documentation, or even contributing a new feature.

To read more about how to contribute to ToolJet: Hacktober Blog andGitHub. In conclusion, you can make a difference even if you are proofreading documentation. Get Hacking!