Here's what Klaw learned from Hacktoberfest 2023

Aiven Community
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The 10th annual Hacktoberfest came to an end - we want to share with you what we’ve learned. We were happy to see Hacktoberfest reaches people new to open source contributing. Analyzing the questions coming in, and the conversations we had with some of these first time contributors, we found gaps in our onboarding and Documentation.

We assumed more of a mentoring role rather than reviewing contributions, but since we didn’t know what we could expect really in terms of activity, that was a good outcome! We had a successful October month, people showed interest in the project and contributed to klaw and klaw-docs, and there’s at least one work item we expect to collaborate on for the longer term.

We want to highlight the contributions by Arjun Singh (@dotarjun on GitHub). Your energy was so good!

Next year we will want to participate again, and host office hours to hopefully shorten the onboarding time for new contributors - new in the sense of new to OSS and new to the project. In the mean time: we’re happy with any and all contributions, don’t be a stranger!

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:100: x yes to what Mathieu said! It was a great experience for us and we’re already looking forward to the 11th edition :ghost:

To everyone participating during #Hacktoberfest (and all OS contributor during the rest of the year):

Giv: Keanu Reeves blowing kisses with text "Thank you"

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Amazing stuff! :smiley: Thanks for reporting back! And thanks to @dotarjun for your awesome work! :muscle:

A question if you’re game: Based on what you tried and your learnings, what’s one thing you will change for next year’s Hacktoberfest and one thing you will do differently in the time in between?

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I think we will definitely try to make a specific first time contributor README. Something for people who are really new both at programming and open source contributions, trying to not assume any knowledge at all.

Maybe we will also consider making the issues evn more detailed, specifically by suggesting implementations. Even if this is a bit dangerous, as it could lead to simply copying and pasting the implementation suggestions, which is not very conducive to learning ^^

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