Thanks HacktoberFest!
Tags: hacktoberfest, sideprojects, procrastination, career
Published: 2019-10-07 07:55:11

Just a small diversion before the article begins in earnest...

> I'm available for hire! If you want to get in touch contact details are available in this twitter [thread](https://twitter.com/booyaa/status/1179297971906715648).
 
> Alternatively you can either drop me message here or check out my [profile](https://dev.to/booyaa) for LinkedIn details.

> `</jobAd>`


Photo by Kerstin Wrba on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/zeInZepl_Hw)

I've participated in a couple of HacktoberFests (for the uninitiated this is a month-long challenge to help make open source projects better. Check out the tag below for more info).

{% tag hacktoberfest %}

Last year was a special HacktoberFest because I earned my t-shirt by doing my day job! That's right, I was working on Open Source projects for public sector clients and getting credit for HacktoberFest. 💪

This year I intended to carry on as usual, but for some reason (unknown to me) a couple of PRs from an old side project caught my eye. The project was a crate ([Rust](https://dev.to/t/rust) parlance for a package) called `wifiscanner`

{% github booyaa/wifiscanner no-readme %}


A quick look and I could see there was no reason to not merge them, they were passing their tests in Travis (CI/CD).

This got me thinking about improvements I could make to the project more friendly to contributors:

- include a contribution guide.
- introduce GitHub actions since it's my current hammer (see exhibits [a](https://dev.to/booyaa/icymi-github-actions-v2-is-a-breaking-change-52nc), [b](https://dev.to/booyaa/github-actions-rust-edition-46e5), [c](https://dev.to/booyaa/github-template-for-rust-projects-1ggl) and [d](https://dev.to/booyaa/github-template-for-terraform-projects-3dbo)) to eventually replace Travis.
- add a `checks` target to the Makefile to format, lint and run tests before contributors submit a PR

Whilst all of these tasks could be done by me I did wonder, would other people like to do these tasks? So on a whim, I created issues and labelled them as [HacktoberFest](https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest). Within a couple of hours, people had claimed the issues and a few days later fixes were issued.

I've been thinking about what were the contributing factors to my success. I think the quality of the issues played a significant part:

- there was a brief explanation of the task
- an acceptance criteria (with one or more check listed items)
- the task could be worked on in isolation
- tasks were relatively short (could be completed in a few minutes)

With all this collaboration, I felt energized to work on my side project again. Heck, I even tweeted about it.

{% twitter 1179113691679207424 %}

{% twitter 1180553738446135296 %}

Whilst this is great (I have missed working on side projects) there a little voice in my head that's telling me the reason for my new found love for this project is that I'm procrastinating because I'm currently job hunting! 😂 

So if you're a remote-friendly company that's hiring for an SRE / DevOps role drop me a message (LinkedIn details are available in my profile)! I'd love to work magic on your systems!