Hacktoberfest thoughts

I never gave participating Hacktoberfest much thought, first of all because reading “Hacktober” makes me think of “Oktoberfest”, one of the worst events German society is maintaining every year - but also because until now I couldn’t consider myself much of “capable” contributing to open source software projects.

This year was different, a coworker asked whether we are up to participate at Hacktoberfest, you’ll get free swag. Free swag?!? Well, I need more t-shirts anyway. Few moments later I’ve signed up somewhere with my e-mail address and read through the guidelines…

Next days I was trying to get an idea what/where I’d like to contribute, soon I’ve figured out I’d like to “Add HCL Templating to AWS Secret Engine of Vault Project”.

Sadly instead of starting this contribution, I’ve exclusively followed the (negative) “public discourse” on whether Digital Ocean should be allowed to launch such a campaign and that it definitively has to be “opt-in” for FOSS project maintainers. This happened after people only tried creating very tiny, pointless contributions at a scale. I was quite upset about the entire discussion, because instead of having a discourse on becoming more inclusive and welcoming - some famous, gate keeper, nerds started tilting the discourse on how little valued outsider contributions are anyway and how much Hacktober fest sucks.

Whatever. There are still few days left-over of October. Maybe I’m fortunate and have some super powers popping up somewhere in myself helping me to still create my planned contribution. Otherwise this will go onto my list of things I wanted to do for myself but never did.

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<3 oo