Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!
Tags: hacktoberfest, opensource, challenge, personal
Published: 2019-11-04 11:28:07

[<time>October 31, 2019</time>](https://www.koskila.net/another-year-another-hacktoberfest-2019/) [Antti K. Koskela](https://www.koskila.net/author/koskila/)

Reading Time: 4 minutes.

I generally work in proprietary – that is, non-open-source – projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it's usually for a hobby. To me, Hacktoberfests are a great diversion from that, and kind of an opportunity to find an excuse to do something a bit different.

This time around, I've been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby – so it's not like I was sleeping anyway. I was able to submit a few useful scripts, bugfixes and documentation improvements during the small hours, or sometimes during the day since I wasn't working, either (both Canada and Finland have decent paternity leaves).

This year, I was working for the whole month – and it's been pretty hectic! While I could luckily contribute a couple of small pull requests to an open-source library we use internally, even that was mostly on my own time. A lot of people simply don't get paid to do OSS :)

On a related, absolute but temporary tangent, this means **anytime someone suggests a GitHub profile is a sufficient, or even a good way to measure someone's worthiness as a programmer, I get rather annoyed**. It's such a privileged, narrow-minded point of view, that just betrays how little the person actually understands anything outside their little bubble.

> Anyway – I took a few days off work, and actually had the time to submit a few pull requests! For someone, that is STILL not really taking part in Open-Source, or even used GitHub that much, I'm happy to limp through once again 😅

And yeah, the irony is not lost on me: being financially so stable, that I'm able to take some time off just to have hobbies and take part in a coding challenge is also _pretty darn privileged_!

But, then again, the joke's on you – it's time-in-lieu, so I actually still got paid, I just had to work overtime for the whole September to accrue the hours... Anyway, enough with checking the privileges, back to the topic!

***

## My pull requests this Hacktober

![And it's a wrap! 4+4 Pull Requests for Hacktoberfest19.](https://www.koskila.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/image-7-1024x138.png?x47822)

I'm just returning to (almost) daily programming work after a couple of years of DevOps-by-proxy debugging, figuring out why Azure AD isn't letting users log in, and managing backlogs on the side. I did code 60 hours per week for the whole September to make a deadline – and that was a great crash course back to programming!

This year I could grab some of the tiny features and bugfixes we've implemented internally to **MatBlazor**and modify them to actually work for the library that's available publicly – and that produced a few small Pull Requests:

| Date | Topic of the PR |
| -- | -- |
| October 10, 2019 18:31 | You submitted [Implements #293](https://github.com/SamProf/MatBlazor/pull/294) to SamProf/MatBlazor |
| October 14, 2019 12:41 | You submitted [Implements SearchTermParamName without ApiUrl (#300)](https://github.com/SamProf/MatBlazor/pull/301) to SamProf/MatBlazor |
| October 24, 2019 18:58 | You submitted [Workaround to enable MatAutocomplete to work inside EditForm](https://github.com/SamProf/MatBlazor/pull/316) to SamProf/MatBlazor |
| October 24, 2019 19:01 | You submitted [Fixes issue #315 (MatAutocomplete's clear-button submits forms)](https://github.com/SamProf/MatBlazor/pull/317) to SamProf/MatBlazor |

However, I wasn't quite happy with just that – during the hectic and somewhat painful project that's kind of still going on, a major pain point was getting the **Azure DevOps pipelines** to work the way we wanted to – and that was in part due to misleading, outdated or just not comprehensive enough documentation. Luckily, it's almost all open-sourced nowadays – so I could try and fix it myself! :)

Ok, ok – admittedly, I did take the chance to post a few blog articles myself, too! But everything generic enough to share on docs.microsoft.com, I submitted as a Pull Request. See below:

| Date | Topic of the PR |
| -- | -- |
| October 27, 2019 07:51 | You submitted [Fixes #1340 by updating the Chrome & ChromeWebDriver versions.](https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-image-generation/pull/1352) to microsoft/azure-pipelines-image-generation |
| October 27, 2019 19:15 | You submitted [Fixes #6038 (example uses vstsFeed, should use publishVstsFeed)](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs/pull/6151) to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs |
| October 28, 2019 08:47 | You submitted [Fixes the broken line breaks on NuGet task's documentation (issue #6154)](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs/pull/6155) to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs |
| October 31, 2019 16:35 | You submitted [Improves the documentation for nuget pack -action](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs/pull/6215) to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs |

Ok – stop laughing at the "fixes the broken line breaks" already! That stuff really bothers me, so of course I'd fix it. 🧐

So, once again – **huge thanks to DigitalOcean and DEV for the challenge**. I appreciate the little bit of extra encouragement to make people (myself included) contribute whatever they can!

As a side note – really looking forward to the T-shirt! Having participated in a few different hackathons and challenges, the only organizer that ever actually DID send me the t-shirt was DigitalOcean! 😂 Appreciate it, folks.

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