Preptember 2024

It’s September…again…already! Time for 2024 Preptember. September is National Preparedness Month, typically used to prepare for emergencies, but it means different things in different communities. In the open-source development community, it’s a time to register and prepare for Hacktoberfest.

You can learn more about Hacktoberfest here. It is a month-long event in October to contribute to the open-source tech community. Contributors can share their solutions and ideas, network with other developers, and demonstrate their newly learned skills. Along the way, participants earn rewards they can show off throughout their Hacktoberfest journey. (I’ll post more about my Hacktoberfest journey throughout this series. )

Preptember is a time to find open-source projects that align with your interests and skill level, expand and build upon existing skill sets, and learn new skills. Prepping before Hacktoberfest starts in October will help you stay focused, avoid the stress of searching for projects, and give you extra time to set up your developer environments.

I’m starting to document my journey here in my blog this year. I’ve set a few goals to prepare for Hacktoberfest. One of the event's objectives is to have four pull requests accepted and merged. As a reward for registering and for each pull request accepted and merged, the sponsors will give you a digital badge through Holopin.io to represent your participation and achievements.

One of the biggest benefits of participating in Hacktoberfest is building your community, meeting new friends, growing as a developer, and sharing resources.

First things first: registration for Hacktoberfest opens on September 23, 2024 this year. I’ve already registered. You can register and find great resources about how to participate here.

I plan to make some bigger contributions than I did last year. Some of my pull requests were in no-code and prompt engineering with Illa. This year, I’d like to focus more on problem-solving code challenges, APIs, and AI technology in my pull requests.

You can find projects that will count for Hacktobefest through Major League Hacking (MLH), which also distributes Holopins upon participation and completion of select events. Other companies that offer Holopins or swag for making meaningful (non-SPAM) contributions to their open-source projects can be found here.

Preptember in the open-source community is about preparing for Hacktoberfest by setting goals for what you want to learn and what you want to build. Tell me, in the comments, about some of the goals you are preparing to achieve during Hacktoberfest.