How we spent Hacktoberfest 2022

October, it’s a month that reminds most people of Halloween and dressing up; however, for developers, it can have a very different meaning. Octobers to a lot of us developers, mean Hacktoberfest and contributing to open source. Most of us have some piece of software we just can’t live without. For us at CodeChem, open source is a very big part of our everyday lives and we try to contribute as often as we can in any way that we can.

For this Hacktoberfest we decided to help out by sponsoring some project that we love and use. Lately, we have been exploring Remotion, an open-source framework for creating videos via React components. Remotion had just announced a $2,000 budget that they had dedicated to bounties for some of the issues on their GitHub. This sparked an idea for us - in the spirit of giving and Hacktoberfest , we wanted to show our appreciation for such an awesome piece of open-source software, so we chipped in and doubled their issue bounty pool to $4,000 in the hopes of amplifying the Hacktober magic.

In total, 27 issues were fixed - that means bugs were fixed, features were implemented and documentation was improved thanks to the support of everyone in the open-source community.

Our contribution did not stop at just doubling the Hacktoberfest bounty pot, we’re developers first and foremost, so we did what we do best, we sat down, wrote some code, opened a few PRs (No bounty for us, we do it for love ❤️). But we also did something interesting and held a talk on Remotion at our local BeerJS in Skopje.

Andrej, our local Remotion enthusiast held a presentation on what Remotion is and how we can use it to create a video of the audience's favorite beers. It was a fun, interactive talk and brought something new to the JS scene in Skopje.

As for the PRs, one of our developers, Stefan Uzunov improved the Remotion CLI by adding some enhanced interactivity and sane defaults when picking which composition gets rendered, while Ilija Boshkov contributed by packaging an existing component into a mainline Remotion package for adding motion blur to Remotion videos.

Hacktoberfest did not end at just Remotion, this month our awesome Andrej released a new open-source NPM package for easily adding animations to Chakra UI components.

All in all, it was a very productive month for us. We would like to say that it was our pleasure to support Remotion and we’re so happy that so much work has been done. This part is to you - the reader, we would like to encourage you to go out and contribute to your favorite open-source software. It could be as easy as going to the project’s GitHub repository and looking at some of the issues, we’re sure the maintainers as well as the users will appreciate your help. Any contribution counts, and none is too small, a lot of our world today runs on software built by many people just like you and any one of us.

❤️, Code Chem