Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio. Five quality pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories, after this you’ll receive a cool t-shirt if you’re already registered. This year I decided to participate.
I was really inspired after attending to DerbyCon VIII; since I’m a Python and .NET developer I decided to submit some PRs to SILENTTRINITY, make few updates to GlucoLog, a small API focused on keeping track of glycemia levels and create a Strong Passwords Generator.
It was a really good decision. I learned a lot while I was coding in IronPython. It was more than just learning the syntax, I was able to see more about how .NET really works. Because I was submitting Pull Requests to others projects, I focused myself on creating good and readable code. The value of the PR submitted should be clear, this helped me to concentrate just on the important stuff.
Another cool thing was that I met smart people with some common interests, for me this is very valuable.
In just a month of coding, I did learn a lot, but also I think I became a better developer.