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As a maintainer of a number of open source projects I understand the frustration with Hacktoberfest. However, I am concerned the people who are actually most negatively impacted by it are folks who genuinely want to start contributing to a project and are lost in the chaos.
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When I was in school (and still to this day) I will often get my feet wet with a project by cloning and exploring the source code. During this process, I sometimes encounter obvious typos, particularly in documentation and code comments. Usually, I will submit a patch.
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This is valuable for a number of reasons. First, it is free proofreading for a maintainer, and as a maintainer, I appreciate that! Second, and more importantly, it gets the contributor accustomed to the patch workflow of the project with a low consequence PR.
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One of the things that often gets undervalued in OSS is momentum. A tight loop of submitting a patch, getting it reviewed, and getting it merged typically correlates to more involvement from a new contributor. I have felt this from both the contributor and maintainer side.
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Starting small and building momentum allows you to ramp up to larger and larger contributions. Tackling a big issue as a first contribution can often feel daunting as you invest a lot of time, then have to rebase and modify large diffs to conform with project patterns.
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Hacktoberfest is clearly broken, and I understand the need for maintainers to bulk close PRs, but I challenge all of us to try to wade through the mess to make sure we don't shutter legitimate contributions.
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Lastly, I encourage everyone to examine their unconscious bias towards folks who do not speak English as their first language when PRs are submitted during this time.
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With so many PRs being submitted for written documentation, legitimate contributions are sometimes overlooked because of grammar or spelling. Please consider what your own PR would look like to a project that primarily used a different language than your first language.
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