Your Privacy

This site uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience and deliver personalized content. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.
COOKIE POLICY

Skip to main content

Hackoberfest 2020 | Participation Perks

By Cody Halbleib

Hackoberfest 2020 | Participation Perks
Back to insights

This year, UDig participated in Hacktoberfest 2020. Hacktoberfest is an initiative hosted by Digital Ocean every Fall to increase and improve contributions to open-source software. Our developers contributed to several different projects, and we banded together to start new projects. This blog shares our thoughts on why we encourage you to take part in Hacktoberfest next year.  

Explore Impressive Tech Stacks & Grow your Skills

One of our teams worked on a .NET Core and Angular application hosted in Docker. The team for this project self-organized and had never worked together on a development project. The group agreed on one ground rule – everyone was free to develop compelling technology. This ground rule enabled front-end developers to explore back-end development and vice-versa, providing a safe space for developers to succeed outside of their comfort zone. The freedom of choice made leveling-up our skillset an enjoyable process. 

Build Camaraderie

As previously mentioned, the folks on the .NET Core application team had never worked together on a development project. Without ever meeting in person due to the ongoing pandemic, we developed requirements, assigned the work items to development sprints, and began development within the first few days of the project kickoff. This increased reliance on each other and built new friendships. 

Share Expertise

Each of the UDig developers had the expertise to share. Every member of the team came from a different development background. We had expert data modelers, front–end developers, and back–end developers. We performed code reviews for our domain of expertise, benefiting the whole team.  

Gain Familiarity with Emerging Technology

Our team contributed to community open-source software as well. The process of searching across GitHub for an exciting project expands your overall awareness of available libraries and applications. One of these projects could be a library that saves the day for a client down the road! This event is perfect for keeping up-to-date on the latest and greatest modern technologies. 

Improve Accountability

Hacktoberfest enhanced guidelines this year, which improved contribution quality and accountability. Developers are incentivized to participate in Hacktoberfest because, after four pull requests in October, they receive a free tee-shirt or can have a tree planted on their behalf. Developers only receive credit for a pull request after a repository maintainer approves their pull request. The incentive holds developers accountable to complete the event by contributing quality code. One of our in-house developers even created a project that tracked each developer’s progress towards the pull request goal. Some of our developers blew past the four required contributions. 

Contributions have a Global Reach

Fixing a bug on a well-known open-source project can positively affect thousands of developers. The global reach of these changes is personally fulfilling knowing that it improves the quality of life for other users. Additionally, these types of changes help to improve your personal and organization’s brand. 

Hacktoberfest empowers participants to step outside of their comfort zone, communicate personal expertise, gain familiarity with emerging technologies, learn and improve personal accountability, and contribute to improving the world. We encourage you to take part in next year’s Hacktoberfest! 

About Cody Halbleib

Cody Halbleib is a Senior Consultant on the Software team. His family is his partner, Jamie, and his Border Collie mix, Walter.

Digging In

  • Software Engineering

    When There’s Too Much to Fix: How Smart Prioritization Unlocks Revenue at Scale

    Every operations team has a backlog. The question isn’t whether you can clear it — it’s whether you’re clearing it in the right order. For most teams, the honest answer is no. And that gap between the order work gets done, and the order it should get done is quietly costing organizations millions. The Volume Problem High-volume exception processing shows up across […]

  • Software Engineering

    Creating Reusable Code Templates to Reduce Client Project Startup Time

    In consulting, one of the least visible but most expensive phases of a project is the beginning. Teams can spend days or weeks setting up repositories, agreeing on structure, wiring basic infrastructure, and solving problems that have already been solved many times before. Code templates are a practical way to reduce overhead while improving consistency. […]

  • Software Engineering

    Player Three Has Entered the Game: How AI Is Finally Bridging the Divide Between Design and Engineering

    As AI begins to become more prominent in our day-to-day lives, I find myself in a unique position. As a practicing software engineer and UI/UX designer, I am genuinely happy to see the introduction of AI tools begin to take shape in our industry. But more importantly, I am happy to start seeing the effects it is having on what has historically been a pretty challenging relationship: the […]

  • Software Engineering

    The Disappearing Middle of Software Work: Why the Bookends – Strategy & Impact – Matter Most Now

    Here’s a question nobody in enterprise software wants to sit with: what happens to the middle? Not the middle of the org chart. The middle of the work. The vast, expensive layer of effort that has defined enterprise software delivery for thirty years—translating what the business wants into working code. The requirements-to-implementation pipeline. The “build phase.” […]

  • Software Engineering

    Zero-Code Telemetry with OpenTelemetry’s OBI

    Full distributed tracing and exception capture for any application — without writing a single line of instrumentation code. View the source code on GitHub → The Premise Observability is essential for understanding what’s happening inside your services, but instrumenting an application by hand — adding trace spans, logging calls, and metric counters throughout your codebase […]

  • Software Engineering

    Building a Consultant in the Trenches: How Playing Offensive Line Shaped My Consulting Career

    People often ask me the same question when they find out that I played college football: “Do you miss it?” On the surface, it’s a bad question with an obvious answer. Yes. However, if I give myself a minute to sit with that question, the answer is more nuanced. Yes, I miss playing football, but […]