How to Hacktoberfest 2022
Experts share tips and experiences with Hacktoberfest, highlighting ways to find projects, make contributions, and connect with the developer community
Episode Description
JavaScript Jam Live discusses Hacktoberfest preparation, tips for first-time open source contributors, and the exciting potential of WebAssembly running full systems in the browser.
Episode Summary
This JavaScript Jam Live episode centers on preparing for Hacktoberfest, the annual month-long open source contribution event co-sponsored by DigitalOcean and GitHub. The conversation opens with Anthony Campolo teasing a future topic—Postgres running in the browser via WebAssembly—which sparks a brief but enthusiastic tangent about WASM's potential to emulate entire operating systems and development environments inside a browser tab. The discussion then shifts to Hacktoberfest, with GitHub developer advocate Rizel Scarlett explaining how the event works, how to register, and where to find repositories labeled for participation. She shares her own journey from feeling intimidated by open source to becoming a regular contributor, emphasizing the importance of joining community Discords and taking time to understand a project before jumping in. Philip, co-founder of Vue Storefront, offers the maintainer's perspective, urging contributors to follow contribution guides, pick well-described issues, and ask questions rather than go silent when blocked. The panel also addresses common pitfalls like spam pull requests and the value of non-code contributions. A closing lightning round highlights reasons to participate, from career networking and skill-building to the satisfaction of working on a team and getting real code reviews.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introduction and Open Mic Setup
Scott Steinlage welcomes listeners to JavaScript Jam Live, a weekly Wednesday show focused on JavaScript and web development. He explains the open mic format and encourages audience participation, noting that some of the best conversations come from listeners requesting to speak.
Ishan Anand outlines the day's agenda: Hacktoberfest, a viral article about React, and the Qwik framework hitting beta. He invites panelists to suggest additional topics and sets the collaborative tone for the hour ahead.
00:04:19 - Postgres in the Browser and the WASM Future
Anthony Campolo teases an upcoming topic—a company called Snaplet has gotten Postgres running in the browser through WebAssembly by emulating a full Linux VM using the v86 x86 virtualization project. The panel discusses the implications of running entire operating systems inside a browser tab.
Ishan frames WASM as the next evolution of computing in the browser, comparing it to the progression from simple UIs to Ajax-powered apps to thick clients. He highlights Stackblitz running VS Code and Node entirely in-browser and envisions a future where developers can spin up complete environments—code editor, app server, and database—without installing anything locally.
00:10:39 - Introducing Hacktoberfest and How It Works
After a brief transition, Rizel Scarlett, a developer advocate at GitHub, introduces herself and explains Hacktoberfest: a month-long October event encouraging open source contributions, co-run by DigitalOcean and GitHub. Participants register on the Hacktoberfest website, find issues labeled "Hacktoberfest" on GitHub or GitLab, and aim for four accepted pull requests to earn a T-shirt or have a tree planted.
Rizel emphasizes that this year's event highlights non-code contributions such as documentation, design, and project management. She walks through how to find participating repositories using GitHub's topics page, the First Timers Only website, and a Twitter account that surfaces good first issues in real time.
00:22:00 - Preparing in Preptember and Overcoming Fear
Rizel recommends joining the Hacktoberfest Discord for announcements and project sharing, and suggests joining individual project communities on Slack or Discord to build familiarity before October. She shares her own story of being intimidated by open source—afraid experts would mock her code—until joining a community Discord humanized the maintainers and made her comfortable asking questions.
The panel relates to Rizel's experience, with Anthony and Ishan both acknowledging the anxiety of submitting that first pull request. Rizel explains that slowing down, understanding the project, and introducing herself to community members transformed her relationship with open source, turning her into a regular contributor.
00:29:25 - The Maintainer's Perspective on Hacktoberfest
After a mid-show break, Philip from Vue Storefront shares the maintainer side of Hacktoberfest. He describes common problems: spam pull requests with trivial changes, contributors who skip contribution guidelines, and people who take on issues without consulting maintainers about the project's direction, leading to wasted effort on both sides.
Philip advises contributors to pick well-described good first issues, read the contributing.md file carefully, and not hesitate to ask questions when blocked. He notes that quality contributions are rare and valuable, and that a bad contribution costs both the contributor and maintainer significant time. Despite these challenges, he affirms Hacktoberfest's value as an icebreaker that has brought lasting contributors to Vue Storefront.
00:38:32 - Pitfalls, Spam, and Choosing the Right Project
Ishan notes that PRs must be marked "Hacktoberfest accepted" by maintainers to count, which filters spam. Rizel warns about spammy contributions driven by people chasing green squares, and advises checking whether a project has good documentation as a sign of organization and inclusivity. Anthony humorously warns about malicious PRs injecting crypto mining code.
Brian Douglas joins and raises a practical question: how do complete beginners choose which project to contribute to? He recommends starting with tools you actually use, building something to encounter real issues, and joining project Discords to observe and learn before contributing. Anthony adds that newer, smaller projects are often more welcoming and actively seeking help than large established ones.
00:51:46 - Pairing, Time Investment, and the Journey Mindset
Rizel shares that her first Hacktoberfest contribution took two to three days including reading documentation, while subsequent ones took about a day. She mentions that pairing with someone can bring that time down to about two hours. Ishan encourages viewing contribution as a journey where the pull request comes near the end rather than being the starting point.
The panel discusses accountability strategies like pairing with friends or livestreaming contributions. Ishan synthesizes the conversation by suggesting contributors should first become users and community members, understanding pain points naturally before attempting code changes, making the whole process feel less intimidating and more organic.
00:54:37 - Lightning Round: Why You Should Do Hacktoberfest
The episode closes with a rapid-fire round where each panelist shares their reason to participate. Anthony advocates for internet points and green squares, Jen appreciates having a concrete goal, Trash highlights career networking and the team experience of getting real code reviews, and Rizel adds that it expands your technical horizons beyond what your day job offers.
Brian Douglas caps the session with a story about a Periscope engineer who maintained the OBS virtual camera plugin, mentored a 16-year-old contributor into becoming the project's maintainer, and launched that young person's tech career—illustrating how open source relationships can transform lives in unexpected ways. The hosts sign off reminding listeners to return next Wednesday for a discussion on WebAssembly.
Transcript
00:00:01 - Scott Steinlage
Welcome, everybody. Welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. What's up, Anthony? Philip? Lots of great people in here. Gentech. Hey, what's up? Okay, Anthony is requesting to come up. I guess I'll add you as a speaker. There you go. Alrighty, invite to co-host. There you go. Invite sent. Can you guys hear me okay? Everything good?
00:00:31 - Anthony Campolo
I can hear you, yes. Can you hear my woos?
00:00:34 - Scott Steinlage
I can't hear you.
00:00:35 - Trash
Woo.
00:00:37 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah, cool. Guess what? I'm just pumped because I've got my Rodecaster Pro set up and my mic and everything, finally, after a week of not doing that. I'm excited. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Today is JavaScript Jam Live. We do this every Wednesday at 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, and today we're gonna be talking about Hacktoberfest and some other things, open source, all that. We got some fun people coming and joining us today to chat about all this wonderfulness as well, so stick around. Maybe some people you know, including Anthony. Hey, yeah, that guy. So JavaScript Jam, you know, this is where we talk about everything and anything JavaScript, as well as, you know, web-development-related stuff. We like to call this kind of like an open mic thing, you know, a little more casual. In fact, we love it when the audience gets involved. So if you have any questions or you have any statements or opinions or whatever it might be, please feel free to request to come up. More than happy to have you, and it really helps the conversation keep going.
00:02:05 - Scott Steinlage
Not just that, honestly, that's where we get some of the best conversations. It's when people in the audience are contributing and participating. So feel free to request, and we will bring you up. Oh, look at that, lots of requests coming in here. So with that being said, I'd like to turn it over to our co-host here, Ishan, to kick us off with the awesome conversation about Hacktoberfest and open source.
00:02:41 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, thank you. So, you know, as Scott said, we're an open mic on anything JavaScript- and web-development-related. And Scott, if you get a chance, if you can put the link to the newsletter we send out that usually has, you know, a couple links for suggested topics. And this week I think we had three topics suggested. One is obviously Hacktoberfest, which we'll talk about in a second, right around the corner. Hopefully we're getting, I think we're getting Brian Douglas and maybe Rizel from GitHub who are going to join us as well to talk through Hacktoberfest. Then second, we can talk about this really popular article about React that made the rounds on, it seemed like, every place in every developer forum. It was "React, I Love You, but You're Bringing Me Down." And then the third thing was Qwik, this new next-generation framework actually from the creator of the original AngularJS, hit beta. We can talk about what makes Qwik so cool and interesting. But those are some of the suggested topics. But again, we like to be audience-driven as much as possible, and I see a bunch of requests already. You know, Jen, good to see you.
00:04:08 - Ishan Anand
Anthony as well, another regular. I don't know if you guys had anything you wanted to add to the agenda that you wanted to talk about or comment on. And I see we got Trash and...
00:04:19 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, have you met Trash before, Ishan? He's a streamer buddy.
00:04:24 - Ishan Anand
Oh, okay. Very cool. Well, welcome to the club. Was there something you wanted to raise as an additional topic we can jump into? I'm happy to throw away the agenda.
00:04:36 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, yeah. This is not a topic that we should get into. This is more of a teaser for a topic we should talk about next week. I know someone who happens to be a CEO at a database company who happens to have gotten Postgres working in the browser through Wasm. You can run a Linux VM inside of a Wasm thing, and you can run an entire Postgres database in a browser tab.
00:05:03 - Ishan Anand
I think I saw this on Hacker News.
00:05:05 - Scott Steinlage
All right.
00:05:06 - Anthony Campolo
No, it hasn't even been shared yet. There's a GitHub for it. And if you go to GitHub.com/snaplet/postgres, just Postgres, not PostgreSQL, then you will find that they're going to put out a blog post about it on Monday. Which is why I say this is not really, like, news yet. This is, like, alpha. But it's super, super interesting. I find it an absolute mad scientist experiment.
00:05:34 - Ishan Anand
So let's see if we can get them for... Yeah, let's... I'm going to cheer for that. Where's my equivalent of the emoticon there?
00:05:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no, I'll put you in touch with Peter.
00:05:45 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, yeah, that'll be great. I mean, here's what's... I'll take a quick tangent on that. I feel like it's a matter of time until everything gets emulated in a Wasm. Like, it's the new container, it's the new... just like everything ended up in a VM and then ended up in a container, this is the new container. And WebAssembly as a technology is just really amazing and fascinating. The example that really blew me away was when they ran VS Code and Linux. I think StackBlitz did this. And Node entirely in the browser. You get your entire app. It's not just you're running VS Code in the browser. When you type commands in and you have Node execute, it's executing in your browser. Which is crazy because you got V8 emulating Node, which includes V8. It's a little bit like madness.
00:06:42 - Anthony Campolo
Inception nesting dolls.
00:06:45 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, exactly. And I think I saw as well somebody ran WordPress in the browser using WASM. I'll Google for that in a second if I get a chance.
00:07:03 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, this is what kind of blew me away when Peter told me that they were doing it with, like, a Linux VM, because that made me realize it's like the fact that it's Postgres is kind of irrelevant at that point, because you're running an entire operating system. So there's really no limit to what you could do once you've done that.
00:07:19 - Ishan Anand
Wait, they put Postgres in a VM and then put that in Wasm?
00:07:25 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, so it's this thing called V86JS, or x86. If you go to GitHub.com/copy/v86, it's x86 virtualization in your browser. Recompile x86 to Wasm on the fly. So yeah, it just emulates machine code. That was the whole point of WASM. It's WebAssembly. Once you have an assembly language, you could just run anything. So you could run an entire operating system?
00:08:04 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, you could.
00:08:07 - Anthony Campolo
Whether they should or not is a completely separate question.
00:08:10 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, this is all fascinating material, I think, for next week, but I think WASM is such an interesting and fascinating technology. I pulled it up, GitHub.com/copy/v86, I found it, and it makes a lot of sense because what WASM is, is a better-defined, I guess, virtual machine and instruction set. And this basically just takes anything that was compiled for your Intel CPU and just makes it work in Wasm. And I feel like this is just the beginning of everything in the browser. I guess let's put it this way. The first generation was you had a browser, and then the second generation of everything in the browser was you had maybe part of the interface for an application, but the back end ran on some server, whether it's Google Search or whether it's like Salesforce. And you had, let's call it, a primitive UI. The third generation was Ajax, where now you could have really application-class UIs, but still there was a back end that needed to run way off on some server. And here we are, maybe the fourth or fifth generation, depending on how you count, where essentially the back end itself now can potentially run in the browser.
00:09:41 - Ishan Anand
Although more realistically, I think the best model for this might be what we've seen with native applications on mobile, where it's basically a thick client. So it's got a lot more code than you traditionally send to the browser. But I think it's now potentially everything. That's really exciting because it means you could have your entire dev environment as a developer, your application server, your database, and your code running in the browser. You don't have to bother installing or spinning up an environment. You could just be like, click on something and go to GitHub and boom, you've got your whole environment, the code editor, all the way down to the database. I'm really excited for that WASM future. That's one of the other things that WASM, I think, will allow us to do. That's really exciting. Well, thank you for bringing that up. That's usually interesting.
00:10:39 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I thought you'd nerd out on that.
00:10:41 - Ishan Anand
Oh, yeah, I'm trying to hold myself back.
00:10:43 - Jen
Next time, hold him back. Holding back.
00:10:47 - Scott Steinlage
By the way, Rizel joined us. What's up? She's on stage.
00:10:52 - Rizel Scarlett
Hey, what's up?
00:10:55 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, thanks for being here. Let's get to the topic of the hour, so to speak, which is the highlight, is Hacktoberfest. And we have Rizel, who's a developer advocate at GitHub, to walk us through kind of the ins and outs and get people oriented to Hacktoberfest. So before we jump into that, Rizel, why don't you just tell people a little bit about yourself. I've kind of introduced you as, you know, the GitHub developer advocate. The second thing I'll say is you were a speaker at the Composability Summit back at the end of July. You gave what I thought was one of the best-styled slide decks. They had so much personality, I thought they were fantastic. Yeah. But let me give you just a few minutes. Tell people about yourself, and then let's jump into Hacktoberfest. And thank you for being here.
00:11:43 - Rizel Scarlett
Of course.
00:11:44 - Brian Douglas
Can I cut in really, really quick just to say, y'all, Rizel's just phenomenal, and everybody should be really, really, really excited that she's here because we always have really cool stuff during JavaScript Jam, and having Rizel here is, like, double good.
00:12:04 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely.
00:12:06 - Rizel Scarlett
Now I'm super gassed up, but I also have to, like, live up to that. Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed speaking at Composability Summit, and I always try to make my slides nice because I'm like, if the talk is bad, at least people get, like, distracted by the slides and be like, I really like those. But yeah, my name is Rizel, and I'm a developer advocate. I'm a junior developer advocate at GitHub. Been here for a year. Before that I was a software engineer for about, like, three years. And I like doing nonprofit things on the side too, like introducing women of color, non-binary people of color, to code. And I'm pumped about Hacktoberfest. I participated in it last year, but that's kind of when I just joined GitHub. So I'm really excited that I'm getting to be at, like, the beginning parts of it, what people call, like, Preptember. And I'm excited to tell you all a little bit more.
00:13:07 - Ishan Anand
Great. So let's start with, you know, for people who have no context whatsoever, just tell them what Hacktoberfest is. It's been going on, I think, for eight or nine years. Just tell them the brief history and what it is, and then we can keep going.
00:13:23 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah. Hacktoberfest is a month-long event in October that DigitalOcean and, well, GitHub and DigitalOcean are in partnership, and they kind of use this time to encourage people to contribute to open source more. So I think a lot of the focus has always been on, like, first-time contributors. But that doesn't mean we're only limiting it to that. We want to encourage veteran contributors and first-time contributors to get involved in Hacktoberfest. And the way that it works is open source maintainers will find a bunch of, like, good first issues, or if people don't know what good first issues are, that's essentially issues that you can contribute to even if you don't have a lot of context about the project. And they'll label it Hacktoberfest in the issue. And that allows you to enter the competition. So you do have to register on the Hacktoberfest.com website. It allows you to enter the competition and win a couple of things. I don't remember what the awards are this year, but last year they gave free swag. And if you got four or more Hacktoberfest-accepted pull requests, or you had the option to plant a tree in your name if you were like, I have enough swag, I don't need all that.
00:14:49 - Rizel Scarlett
Let me give back in a different way. But it's essentially just a way for folks to help out maintainers, to get their project to the end, and then also for folks to get a chance to participate in and discover more open source communities. And this year, which is gonna be my last point, the push is going to be more on non-code contribution. So I know when people think open source, they're always thinking, like, this has to be a coding contribution. But if you're good at, like, project management or design or documentation, or you want to gain those skills, this is also a spot for you to practice. That's all.
00:15:33 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, that last part I saw, and that's a really good point. I think too often, whether it's building websites or in an open source project, everyone thinks it's all about the code. And it's actually as much about, when you're building a site, the content, or when you're building an open source project, it's about the community, or it's about making sure it's easy for people to join that community. Those non-code contributions I think tend to be unfortunately undervalued, and they're actually extremely leveraged in the success of a project. It's almost less sometimes about the code than making sure people are aware of it. Just like the best product in the market doesn't always win, it's actually the one that most people know about. It's really a great change to see that added. Regarding the prizes this year, I looked it up. It's 40,000 participants. So 40,000 people will get one of two prizes: a tree planted in their name, as you mentioned, or a Hacktoberfest 2022 shirt. Do you know in past years, did they get enough participation that they actually ran out of shirts, or did they have any leftover?
00:16:52 - Rizel Scarlett
That's a good question. I don't... I haven't heard of them saying, we ran out. Like, if they're at a point where they need more, I feel like they just order more.
00:17:06 - Anthony Campolo
We live in an age of abundance. More shirts can always be made, yeah.
00:17:10 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah.
00:17:12 - Ishan Anand
At least for T-shirts.
00:17:13 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah,
00:17:15 - Ishan Anand
Well, T-shirts and currencies, evidently, but it's the quantitative easing for T-shirts. The other thing that people should know is pull and merge requests are another thing you mentioned. And it has to be a GitHub repository that has the Hacktoberfest label on it. I believe GitLab also qualifies.
00:17:44 - Rizel Scarlett
Yes, they are participating too. Yeah. GitLab or GitHub.
00:17:48 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:17:48 - Ishan Anand
Okay, so I guess if you're somebody who has never participated in Hacktoberfest before, what is, like, the best way to find a repo and get started or find an issue? Maybe walk people through, like, you know, on GitHub, I'm less familiar with GitLab, but at least on GitHub you can search for that label. You can search for good first issue. Do you want to just walk people through, like, how they would get started on that? And then they also need to first register on the Hacktoberfest site as well. So maybe you can talk just briefly through that and what people need to do.
00:18:27 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah, so definitely I would start with signing... registering on the Hacktoberfest website is super easy. I signed up last night. It took me, like, five minutes, or probably even less. Basically you just press register, and it's going to ask you if you want to authorize it with GitHub or GitLab, whichever platform you're used to, go ahead and do that. And then it just asks for, like, your name and your email address or something. Oh, actually, it asks, like, how do you want to participate? Like, do you want to participate as a contributor, maintainer, event organizer? Are you new to Hacktoberfest, or have you done this before? And are you more interested in code or non-code contributions? It's super, super quick to sign up, but I would do that just to make sure that you get your Hacktoberfest pull request. Now, if you were trying to find a project, there's a couple of ways to do that. But if you go to GitHub.com/topics/hacktoberfest, you will be able to see all the open source projects that have the label Hacktoberfest. And this indicates that, like, they're participating in Hacktoberfest for this year.
00:19:37 - Rizel Scarlett
And, like, if I were y'all, I would start looking now in September. I mean, October is starting pretty quickly, and September is coming to an end pretty quickly, because I know that Hacktoberfest is popular. Like you said, there's, like, 40,000 people participating, and I want people to be able to get a chance to grab a ticket, or an issue. So yeah, go to GitHub.com/topics/hacktoberfest and you'll be able to scroll through different projects that you're interested in. Another option is, like, if you use a project a lot and you're aware that it's open source, or you can check and see if it's open source and has a repository on GitHub or GitLab, that's a good opportunity for you to check in and see if you can contribute to that project. Because if you've been using it, why not give back? But definitely make sure it has the Hacktoberfest label. Another option if you want to contribute to open source is there's a couple of good first issue aggregators.
00:20:52 - Rizel Scarlett
So a couple of websites that find all the good first issues out there that are good for people to get started. So you can go to, I think it's, like, FirstTimersonly.com. That's, like, a really, really good one. You could also go to, there's a Twitter account actually called Good First Issues, and what it does is anytime someone labels an issue a good first issue, it'll get tweeted out. But again, if you want to make sure that you get accepted to Hacktoberfest, then go ahead and make sure that it has that, like, Hacktoberfest label. Trying to think of other options, but I will say those are the three things: go through GitHub.com/topics/hacktoberfest, or look on FirstTimersonly.com, or check out that Twitter account that's called Good First Issues, and you'll be able to find a bunch of good first issues. And just make sure you can find that Hacktoberfest label. Yeah, but stop me so I stop rambling.
00:22:00 - Ishan Anand
No, and I just want to underscore: a good first issue is one that the maintainer has said is the welcome mat laid out for you as a beginner, to say, here's the best way to start, the best thing we need solved that isn't going to be super hard for you to get started on and would be a great contribution. That's a great call-out for how people should get started looking for repositories with Hacktoberfest and good first issues. I know there's a Discord you can join for Hacktoberfest.
00:22:29 - Rizel Scarlett
There is.
00:22:32 - Ishan Anand
Talk a little bit about that and anything else people should be doing in Preptember besides looking for issues and joining the Discord.
00:22:40 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah. Okay. So definitely I should grab the link for y'all so you can pin it to the Twitter Space. But definitely join the Hacktoberfest Discord, because in there they have people sharing their projects, they have announcements and news that pop up. Because right now they're doing a couple of events, like different organizations are doing events in preparation for or in celebration of Hacktoberfest. And those are really good events for you to be able to gain more context about open source. In addition to that, when you brought up Discords, I think another great call-out is if you join a project or you see an open source community on GitHub or GitLab that you're interested in contributing to, but you're not really sure how, one thing that really lowered the barrier for me is just joining their community Discord or Slack or whatever they use to chat, because that helped me to, I think, get familiar with the people in the community and feel like I belong, and then feel okay with asking questions. Because I think something that people get stuck on sometimes is they pick up an issue and then they don't know how to do it, but they're too afraid to ask for help and ask questions.
00:24:00 - Rizel Scarlett
Like, I was definitely that way. So I'm like, definitely start now in September to get familiar with the people in the community. Even maybe clone the project and get familiar with the project too. Because for you to be able to contribute, you kind of have to understand how some parts of it work. Like, click around on the buttons and stuff like that, and be like, okay, this is how this function is firing, this is what's happening within there, so you can gain some context. And then attend those events. So the three things I would say is attend the events that they have, sign up for the Discord, and go ahead and try to gain context about certain projects.
00:24:43 - Ishan Anand
Great. That's actually a good segue for a question that I was going to ask later, which was just tell us what your first experience was. I think you said last year was the first time you participated in Hacktoberfest. What was the experience like for you from, you know, maybe any concerns you had at the beginning, as well as issues you ran into that were unexpected obstacles, and then how it felt at the end to actually, you know, having done Hacktoberfest and maybe a sense of accomplishment.
00:25:13 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah, oh, my God, I'm happy to talk about that. I literally have a talk about this. But basically, the first time I contributed was in August 2021. And before that, everyone always told me, like, you should contribute. And I was like, I don't know. Like, it's mad stressful. Like, I will legit sit down at my computer and try to contribute, and then I'll get stressed out because I'm like, there's so many options, and the code bases look really, really big. And I also was really afraid of people, like, laughing at my pull request. I don't know why. Like, I just thought, like, I would open a pull request and then people would be like, what is that? And so I was like, yeah, I'm just going to skip it.
00:25:53 - Anthony Campolo
Super relatable.
00:25:57 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, it feels like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be written in cuneiform, and, you know, it's going to be on a billboard. And you totally... I can empathize. Sorry, keep going.
00:26:07 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah, no, no. I'm glad that y'all also felt that way, because I'm like, I'm probably writing code with experts, and they're gonna be like, girl, that is not how you do it. So I just ignored it because I'm like, yo, I already get paid to code. I'm not gonna sit here and do this for free. But the reason why I decided to was when I got my job, when I got my offer at GitHub, B. Dougie messaged me and he was like, you should probably try contributing to open source if you're gonna work here. And I was like, he has a good point. But what I decided to change is some of those things that I mentioned earlier, like introducing myself in the Discord, and that helped me get, like, a human sense or feel for the people. I was like, okay, these are not, like, gods or anything. They're normal. They're nice. They're happy to have me within their community. And they all were like, well, we'll help you if you need it. And also, I took some more time to go through the code base and figure out what the project was doing, because before I would just pick up any issue that I saw, and I would be like, oh, maybe this.
00:27:17 - Rizel Scarlett
And then I'll be like, oh, my God, I don't understand what it's saying, or I don't understand what the project even does. So just taking that step back and moving slower and introducing myself to people changed everything. And now I feel good. Like, I contribute to projects a lot now.
00:27:33 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, it was just getting over maybe the fear factor you mentioned at the beginning. I like to think of that label of Hacktoberfest on a repo or an issue as, like, the welcome mat. Like, don't worry, you know, we know you're, I don't know, riding a bike, and you're gonna fall off a few times. Like, that's expected. Feel free. Like, it's trying to create that safe space. Do you remember which repositories and issues you picked for Hacktoberfest?
00:28:03 - Rizel Scarlett
For Hacktoberfest? Oh, shoot. I don't know if I remember. I know I remember the first project I did, and that was Open Sauced. I know that, but I don't.
00:28:12 - Ishan Anand
Oh, that's. That's B. Dougie's project.
00:28:14 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:28:15 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:28:16 - Anthony Campolo
That was one of the first I ever... I didn't necessarily contribute to, but that was the first Discord server I ever joined. It was one of the first, like, Twitch channels I started watching. So, like, there's a long lineage of people B. Dougie has gotten into this world.
00:28:32 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah.
00:28:33 - Brian Douglas
It was my first PR.
00:28:35 - Rizel Scarlett
Oh, my God, you too?
00:28:38 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, on Open Sauced.
00:28:39 - Anthony Campolo
I told her to join Open Sauced.
00:28:42 - Brian Douglas
B. Dougie's gonna be on the show tomorrow. I'm so excited to, like, keep sharing Hacktoberfest tomorrow too.
00:28:49 - Scott Steinlage
Yay.
00:28:50 - Rizel Scarlett
Yes. Oh, my gosh.
00:28:52 - Ishan Anand
Yeah. Yeah, no, he's fantastic. And, you know, I noticed we've got Philip on the stage now. I want to get to Philip. We're at the halfway point, so let me pause, let Scott do his station break, and then I have maybe a question or two for Philip, and we'll turn it to more of the audience format again. Feel free to raise your hands in the second half of the hour and ask our panelists questions. We love when the audience gets interactive. So, Scott, I'll take it to you, and then we can go to the second half.
00:29:25 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. And I don't want to exclude anybody, you know, so let's say, hey, you know what? If you want to be a panelist too, then just raise your hand. Right? It doesn't matter. Everybody's a panelist. Come on now.
00:29:37 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, we've got the Hacktoberfest label on the entire JavaScript Jam Live. It's exactly that. Anyone can come up. Sorry, go ahead.
00:29:45 - Jen
Absolutely.
00:29:47 - Scott Steinlage
All right, so hey, it is halfway through. Thank you all so much for joining us so far. This has been so much fun. Rizel, thank you for telling us your story about Hacktoberfest and how that came about and now where you're at today. Really awesome to see where you've come from with all that. It's just incredible. And what you're doing in the community, we all love it. Thank you for sharing, and please continue to share throughout the rest of this as well. So JavaScript Jam is basically like an open mic type thing, right? Everybody can come up. That's what we keep saying. We really mean it. Please request it. Makes it more fun, adds a lot more value. In fact, some of our most fun and engaging conversations have come from people coming up from the audience and contributing. Whether that's sharing your opinion or asking a question, we'd love to hear from you. And it doesn't matter whether you're a beginner at this or you've been doing this forever. We love to hear from everybody. It really does make for some great listening. Yeah, don't forget to join us next week as well.
00:31:06 - Scott Steinlage
We're here Wednesdays, 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Good time. Thank you all so much. And oh, by the way, you know what, we also have this awesome thing called a newsletter. I don't know if you ever heard of such things. Kind of weird, I don't know. But yeah, we have one of those. So if you actually click on JavaScript Jam, go to our profile. We now make it super easy, and you can click on it and subscribe. How cool is that? So easy you don't have to leave the platform. Amazing. So click on that, subscribe today so you don't miss out on all the amazing upcoming things that we put out there for y'all to know about and participate in and be a part of, including JavaScript Jam Live. All right, back to you, Ishan.
00:31:55 - Ishan Anand
Okay, so thank you, Scott. So Philip, I'm really glad you're here because Philip, for those who don't know, is the co-founder of one of the most popular open source frameworks, Vue Storefront. And I'm really curious to get your perspective as a maintainer on Hacktoberfest. What are you doing from the maintainer side, and what would you recommend other maintainers do to prepare for Hacktoberfest, and what is it like from the maintainer perspective?
00:32:31 - Philip
Hey, Ishan, thanks so much for inviting me. It's always great to talk with you. You set the expectations rather high, but I will try to live up to them. And actually, don't kick me off right after I say it, I never participated in Hacktoberfest from the perspective of someone contributing. I was always participating as someone maintaining the project for five years already. And maybe what I can say is I could tell a little bit from the perspective of a maintainer, what are the most common issues. Because the reality is that when Hacktoberfest is starting, you're getting a lot, a lot of contributions. Everyone wants T-shirts, and I'm glad that this year they're actually not allowing spam pull requests, which was super common. So basically all the popular repositories, they were always getting a lot of pull requests where people were correcting a typo or doing some really weird stuff that provides zero value, and it's definitely not aligned with the strategy and vision of the maintainers of the project. The first thing I would advise to do before contributing to any project is basically not trying to figure out on your own what you want to do.
00:33:55 - Philip
Just pick the issue, pick an issue that is well described, that is marked as good first issue, and do exactly as they said. Because a lot of contributors to open source projects try to do things on their own or come up with inventions on their own, without really consulting it with the maintainers, without understanding what are actually the reasons behind certain decisions. And then those people, they are putting a lot of work into this, and in the end you can't merge it. And it's a fail on both sides. Like, the contributors, they are let down, they're probably not going to contribute. The maintainers are also not so happy, because quality contributions are not such a popular thing, they are rare. And when you have a quality contribution, someone who actually put in an effort to do this contribution, to write this code and to describe everything properly, if this is not in line with what you want, it's just discouraging for both sides. The second thing is read the contribution guide. On every GitHub repository you usually have this CONTRIBUTING.md file, and in this file you have all the rules described, like how you should propose a pull request, what is the branching convention, what are the coding conventions.
00:35:16 - Philip
Also, please read that before, because you will spare a lot of time for yourself, but also the people maintaining those projects, because again, during Hacktoberfest a lot of the job of the maintainers is basically responding to those issues and linking contribution guidance, saying, hey, can you please correct the name of the pull request, or the name of the branch, or this or that. Basically everything is written down. So please, please, please also do that. And the third thing is, don't be scared to ask. This is maybe not completely related to Hacktoberfest, but in general, contributions... when we had contribution days to Vue Storefront, which is kind of like Hacktoberfest, but one day and scoped to only one repository, a lot of people signed up on issues, a lot of people started to work on them, but then they're encountering some blockers, something that is not allowing them to actually proceed. And really not many of them are asking questions, you know, going to the maintainers, asking questions on Discourse or somewhere else. I don't know why. Probably, you know, they just feel a little bit anxious and insecure about this. But the truth is this is exactly what maintainers are used to.
00:36:34 - Philip
This is exactly what they're waiting for. You really want the contributions because for every open source project it's a huge help, but a bad contribution is a waste of time for the maintainer, because they are spending a lot of time on correcting this, going around in another round and another round, and in the end, you know, you are spending ten times more time on it and the maintainer is also spending a lot of their time. So quality of contribution, being well prepared, and in case you're blocked, don't hesitate to ask questions. This is what I usually advise. And of course, no garbage requests that are not what the maintainers are asking for. So that would be my advice. And this is something, you know, I was dealing with throughout the years. Of course it really sounds like I am complaining, etc., but the truth is we got a lot of great contributions, really. And Hacktoberfest is a really nice initiative, and a lot of people that actually contributed for the first time to Vue Storefront kept doing this. So I really appreciate, you know, this value of Hacktoberfest, that it is also a nice icebreaker, a way for people to enter the open source space.
00:37:49 - Philip
But always try to think from the bigger perspective, not only from the perspective of you contributing to the project and, you know, what you will get out of this, but also thinking, how will this fit into the bigger picture? Does it make sense? What is important? I think this is the best way to make a contribution to any project. And this year it doesn't even have to be a code contribution. It could be some sort of advocacy, a talk, whatever. So it all depends what you want to achieve. But if your goal is to find a nice project that you want to support and provide value, probably the best way to do this is just by asking the maintainer of this particular project what is most needed.
00:38:32 - Ishan Anand
That's really, really helpful perspective. I mean, one thing I think we maybe glossed over is when you submit your PR, for it to qualify as one of the four for Hacktoberfest, it has to be marked by the maintainer as Hacktoberfest accepted, for exactly that reason, that it's not spam. And folks should remember, being a maintainer can be a thankless job. Like, you may or may not be getting paid to do it in your full time, and so you don't want to overload our poor maintainers with spam PRs. And I actually had this experience a few years ago. I was making a contribution into a repository, but I knew somebody on the core team, and one of the people assisting them saw it and was like, oh, we're not accepting Hacktoberfest contributions. And I had to say, no, no, wait, this is not part of Hacktoberfest. But they're so inundated. They see all these new contributions from out of nowhere, and they sometimes get overwhelmed. Have you faced that issue of being too overwhelmed during Hacktoberfest? Have you had issues where you've got more than one person, you know, duplicating effort on the same issue?
00:39:50 - Ishan Anand
Or, you know, have you had either of those issues come up for you guys?
00:39:54 - Philip
Well, I will speak from myself, like, personally, not very often. Of course, there were some situations, but I think this is mostly happening in bigger repositories. So I have some friends, for example, in Vue.js core team, and for them it is a plague. This is why I'm saying so much about, you know, thinking about what you're gonna do, double-checking everything, reading the code of conduct, reading the contribution guide. Because in the end, you know, there, of course, is some sort of selfish motivation for that, but I also believe that most of the people contribute to open source for altruistic reasons, and we're already spending time on this. Well, let's prepare for that to make this time most valuable.
00:40:39 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, that makes sense. So, again, we are in the audience phase of this, so feel free to, you know, raise your hand in the bottom of your Twitter Spaces interface and ask our panelists any questions you might want to ask. Back to you, Rizel, for your first Hacktoberfest experience, give folks a sense of how much time it took you. If you remember, do you have a ballpark memory of how long it took? Maybe even for the first contribution. I guess the second, third, and fourth were faster, but how much time do you feel like it took, to give people a sense?
00:41:22 - Rizel Scarlett
Maybe it took me two or three days, like, and then probably could have taken me one day. But I wanted to take some time to, like, I know Philip mentioned reading the contributing guidelines and stuff like that. I wanted to take time to actually read all the documentation that was there. And I was still doing my full-time job, so I think it took me, like, two to three days. And then the other ones took me just that one day.
00:41:50 - Ishan Anand
Got it.
00:41:51 - Rizel Scarlett
Yeah.
00:41:52 - Ishan Anand
And I don't know if you, when you've talked to other people, is that about par for the course for a first-time Hacktoberfest participant, you know?
00:42:03 - Rizel Scarlett
You know, I'm not sure because I haven't talked to other people, but I have, like, paired with people to help them make their first contribution. And I will say, like, when I sat down with them, it maybe took us, like, two hours for them to be able to make a first contribution because they had to, like, set up their environment and everything.
00:42:23 - Ishan Anand
Got it. I really like that suggestion on pairing. Like, I think that's a great way, maybe if folks are scared or intimidated, or just for, you know, accountability. Just like, you know, you say you're going to have a New Year's resolution and you say it publicly, or when you're exercising, right? They say do it with a friend. I really like that as...
00:42:47 - Anthony Campolo
Or create a stream and then bring on guests for your stream to make them.
00:42:51 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, there you go. Exactly. I really like that suggestion of pairing as a way to help make that activation energy lower to participate, and it brings down the time. I mean, two hours to make your first Hacktoberfest PR is a reasonable amount of time. Maybe just for anybody on the panel here, you know, what are maybe the downsides of Hacktoberfest? We've spent a lot of this time telling people to do it, to get started. What might be the unanticipated downsides? Like, are there reasons not to participate? Or unanticipated or unintended or surprising things about Hacktoberfest?
00:43:40 - Rizel Scarlett
I could start. Okay. I wouldn't say, like, these are reasons not to participate. You should participate, but there are things to watch out for.
00:43:50 - Anthony Campolo
Scott, you muted everyone.
00:43:51 - Ishan Anand
No, that was me. Somebody put a request in and then retracted it. By the time I hit the button, it changed. That same space is reused for mute everyone, and so I apologize, Rizel. Keep going.
00:44:07 - Rizel Scarlett
Oh, I didn't realize I was muted. I don't know, I can start over. But basically these are not really, like, you shouldn't participate, but just be aware of, like, Hacktoberfest is super spammy. People just want to get their green squares. A lot of times, like, that's just a goal for people. So they will just hop in and make unnecessary contributions, like Philip was mentioning.
00:44:32 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:44:32 - Rizel Scarlett
So watch out for those as a maintainer and a contributor. Don't be that person either. And I think it's a good thing to look out for if a project has good documentation, like contributing guidelines and all that. Because if not, that's a good indicator that the project's not well organized, that it's not inclusive, because they're not thinking about their community.
00:44:59 - Ishan Anand
Those are good call-outs. Anybody else on the panel?
00:45:02 - Anthony Campolo
Watch out for PRs trying to inject crypto-mining software into your open source projects.
00:45:10 - Ishan Anand
Is that a real thing or a joke, or...?
00:45:13 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, it's usually pretty obvious because you'll get a PR, and you'll be like, what's this entirely new binary package that you're inserting for no reason whatsoever? But yeah, it can happen.
00:45:27 - Brian Douglas
Didn't that happen to Tesla with, like, when they named their car? Somebody injected stuff.
00:45:35 - Anthony Campolo
Lots of people are trying to hack Tesla cars, yes. That's one of the primo, primo things to hack. But yeah, it's not really a Hacktoberfest worry. It's more like a supply-chain thing.
00:45:47 - Ishan Anand
So somebody hacked it? So the car was busy crypto mining when you drove?
00:45:53 - Brian Douglas
I don't know all the details, but they went through and did it through the area that you can name your car. And because it wasn't set up to not allow code, it didn't scan it for code or anything. It just allowed you to put in
00:46:07 - Anthony Campolo
whatever. Siraj Raval mined Bitcoin, Ethereum, in his Tesla. This is that publicity stunt.
00:46:14 - Ishan Anand
Oh, wow. So validate those inputs, kids. Bobby, drop tables. Hey, Brian made it.
00:46:21 - Brian Douglas
But I do have something.
00:46:23 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, I invited him up.
00:46:24 - Brian Douglas
Something that is a question, but also, like, I think it could be a bad thing that may happen of...
00:46:33 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:46:35 - Brian Douglas
Okay. If I'm brand new and have never talked to anybody and am just barely starting to code, I mean, two parts. Where would I start? I get, like, you want to find things that say Hacktoberfest and do things there. But then second, the terrifying one of, like, who do you choose? Are they actually gonna help? Will the community reply? And I know that Open Sauced, and yes, B. Dougie, I'm talking about you, but I was talking about you before you were here, everybody was like, that Discord is really active. But, like, how do you ensure that you're getting the support you need instead of, like, shying away?
00:47:23 - Ishan Anand
I don't know, Brian, if you have. Oh, go ahead.
00:47:26 - Scott Steinlage
I was just gonna say, yeah, maybe Brian would want to say something about that.
00:47:30 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, sorry, I'm just, like, trying to catch up. What was the actual question instead of asking seven questions at once? I'm totally going to be asking you these tomorrow, by the way.
00:47:41 - Brian Douglas
Perfect.
00:47:41 - Brian Douglas
The first one is how do we choose, like, which open source to contribute to? Like, how do people find who to contribute to? And then the second question only, there's...
00:47:58 - Anthony Campolo
There was a startup around finding your next open source contribution.
00:48:04 - Brian Douglas
Okay, not everybody is gonna know that. So, like, if that didn't exist, how would you go search for it to know?
00:48:14 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I guess the topic around here is Hacktoberfest. I literally just jumped in, and I was, like, in calls all morning. Hacktoberfest is a great opportunity to get introduced to a lot of projects or a lot of open source contributing. And the thing that I was trying to solve, like, the past year with Open Sauced is, like, how do you discover projects? So we have hot.opensauced.pizza, which is, like, the explore page for finding projects. Still needs a lot of work. You can literally contribute to it. Like, I would love people to contribute to it. I've got issues open. But it's also harder when the bigger projects don't actually want contributions. Angular is a good example. They have mostly Google engineers that are contributing to it. There are other people who contribute there, but I wouldn't recommend Angular as a good first repo. But if you had a random... So Brandon Roberts actually has this project called Analog, which takes Angular and connects it to Vite. So it's, like, a modern way to look at... Well, Angular is modern, but it's a different lens to look at Angular.
00:49:19 - Brian Douglas
Like, that could use way more contribution and insight and issues and documentation than the actual Angular repo. So I would start with what you're using and what you could potentially open an issue on. Because the best thing you could do is open an issue on things that are legitimately broken. The only way you can do that is by using stuff. So that's, like, my first recommendation. I've got other answers, but I'll wait for other questions.
00:49:44 - Anthony Campolo
I think that the problem with that one for really, really beginners is they're like, well, I'm using React. They don't even know a more fine-grained thing that they could be using that they can contribute to.
00:50:00 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, well, that's a good pushback too as well, because my recommendation is go build something in React or build something hard in React, because you're going to find some issues pretty quickly by just using React ecosystem tooling. But also it's the like, I want a six-pack. Back years ago I had a six-pack. I do not have one now. But, like, I know what the steps are to get a six-pack. Like, I gotta eat vegetables and I gotta stand up and go walk or go work out. And I think it's the same thing. People want to contribute to open source and have their rock-hard abs, their contributor graph, if we can make those green squares into a six-pack. Like, people want that, but they don't know what the steps are to even get there. And that comes from, I think what, Jen, you were kind of alluding to, is sitting in a Discord and looking at conversation and joining in the conversation is going to provide way more value and get you more insight to know, okay, this person built these three features in the last week that I've been sitting here in this Discord.
00:51:00 - Brian Douglas
Maybe I can ask, hey, I have a question, like, how did you even approach caching? Or how did you approach this? Or next time can I review one of your PRs before you merge them, type of deal?
00:51:13 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think the suggestion of Analog, like what Brandon's doing, is that's what I would tell people, is look for projects that are newer. Because the problem with Angular is that there's already a whole thing around it. So there's processes, there's a team, and there's release cadences. Whereas if you find people who are just building stuff, who are just, like, individuals, like, they're going to need help, and they are going to be actively looking for people to help them. So I think finding projects in the right part of their life cycle is really important.
00:51:46 - Ishan Anand
And I like the suggestion to be part of the conversation, like whether that means being a user of it first to see where the pain points are, or something you naturally have encountered. But to view that as the start of your journey and look at it as a journey of which the pull request is one part toward the end of that journey rather than the sole goal and the beginning of it.
00:52:14 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for sharing that, Brian. Honestly, I think most importantly is, please tell me how I can get six-pack abs by just standing up and eating vegetables.
00:52:27 - Brian Douglas
It all takes eight minutes.
00:52:29 - Scott Steinlage
Eight minutes. That's awesome. Rizel, you have your hand up.
00:52:35 - Rizel Scarlett
Wait, when Jen asked that question, I just remembered that another way is both me and Brian have been hosts of Open Source Friday, which is a thing that GitHub does, a stream where they talk to different open source projects. That's another way that people could explore or discover small open source projects. Because we both tend to interview people that don't have, like, the largest projects ever, and that are easier for you to get your foot in the door, or whatever I'm trying to say, but get started. I pinned the playlist to this Twitter Space.
00:53:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, like having friends who are deeply into this stuff and talk to a million people, that's actually the real hack. Then we could just be like, here's 10, go forth.
00:53:27 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, be sure to check out that link, it's at the top here, which Rizel shared. It has the Discord in there and everything. So I'm sure there's lots of good information that you can jump on there as well. So yes, awesome. Thank you all so much for sharing all this wonderfulness. I mean, it's been so cool so far. We've only got a few minutes left here, but I did want to just go ahead and mention, if you guys are out there listening to this right now in the audience, or even from the replay, be sure to click on the face of the person you're getting value from here and follow them if you're not already, because I guarantee you're going to get value from them in other places as well, not just here. So, not to mention JavaScript Jam wouldn't mind the follow too. But thank you all so, so much for joining us. Thank you to everybody who came here to speak and answer questions. But yeah, Ishan, I don't know if you want to spend the next few minutes kind of closing things up and...
00:54:37 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, well, I'll just say again, thank you for everyone who joined us both in the audience and on the panel. Maybe we close it out with a lightning round on just, we haven't really talked directly on this, but why you should participate in Hacktoberfest. Maybe if we go around in one or two sentences to the panel. You know, if people want to give their opinion, feel free to just come off mute and jump in.
00:55:05 - Anthony Campolo
Internet points. Get those sweet, sweet internet points. You know you want them.
00:55:11 - Brian Douglas
Because I want to be cool like all of you and understand what I'm doing. And this is going to be great practice. And also because everybody talks about, like, open source, and B. Dougie was the first person that ever helped me with my PR, and it gives me, like...
00:55:31 - Rizel Scarlett
a goal to do it.
00:55:34 - Brian Douglas
Instead of just, like, I don't know what I'm working on, I'm just gonna do it. It's, like, it's a reason...
00:55:38 - Rizel Scarlett
to work on it.
00:55:41 - Trash
I do it for the T-shirt, if they're doing that this year.
00:55:46 - Scott Steinlage
They are, but.
00:55:49 - Trash
But the actual one, the real, more educational answer is probably open source can open up doors that you normally wouldn't have open. Like, you could potentially contribute to the right project where you meet these people that could be your future co-workers
00:56:01 - Brian Douglas
if they like the work you do.
00:56:03 - Trash
For those reasons alone, I think, like, that's just a good reason, outside of just leaving your comfort zone, being able to feel humility if someone bashes your code. Hopefully they don't bash it, but, you know, give you good feedback and stuff like that. And if you're not someone that actually works on a team, you just stay at home and you're currently learning, it gives you that team feel of getting the code reviews you normally wouldn't get when you're working on projects yourself too. Those are just some quick pointers.
00:56:30 - Rizel Scarlett
Dang, Trash. Oh, wait, B. Dougie's about to talk. Go ahead.
00:56:34 - Brian Douglas
Oh, no, you please go.
00:56:36 - Rizel Scarlett
I was just gonna say that I don't know your name, but it says Trash. You basically said everything I was going to say. The only thing I would add is you'll get experience working with technologies and different projects that you might not be getting a chance to work on at work. So you'll, like, expand your horizon.
00:56:54 - Brian Douglas
Nice. I was just going to jump in real quick, share a quick story. So I have a friend who worked on the Periscope team, which is the current app that we're using, Twitter, and the Spaces is Periscope technology. He ended up selling the product to Twitter, and they built out Twitter Spaces, and then he left and he had some time off and wanted to contribute to open source. So he built the virtual cam for OBS on Mac. It was, like, a bugged version, and he ended up fixing it, and he became the sole maintainer, and then got super burnt out and found a 16-year-old who found the project, opened issues, and he mentored that 16-year-old two years ago to eventually become the maintainer, I think before it got merged upstream into OBS.
00:57:56 - Brian Douglas
What I'm getting at is, like, why do this? It's because that person who worked on the Periscope team is now the mentor of that now-18-year-old who's now getting jobs in tech. And, like, you don't know what you're going to... like, if you want to contribute to React, start contributing or start using React in 2014. Obviously you can't go back in time. So what Anthony said earlier is, like, find projects that need help today and that are smaller and that can take you and mentor you into, like, your next thing two years later, because you don't know who you're working with and what you collaborate on.
00:58:12 - Ishan Anand
Wow, that's a great way to end today's session. Thank you.
00:58:19 - Scott Steinlage
Thank you so, so much. Y'all have been wonderful. Seriously. Give it a high five, clap hearts, all that good stuff for everybody up here that was contributing. Give it to yourself. Give your buddy a pat on the back. All right? Yeah. Thank you so much. You guys are amazing. All right, don't forget we do this every week on Wednesday, 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Join us here on JavaScript Jam Live where we talk about everything JavaScript- and web-development-related. I think we've already got a little bit of a topic from Anthony earlier that we're going to be talking about next week, Wasm, all that good stuff in the browser. Hey, hey. All right, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, don't party too hard, okay? But have fun.
00:59:06 - Anthony Campolo
I'll party as hard as I want, Scott.
00:59:07 - Scott Steinlage
How dare you. Contribute to that open source, folks. And, you know, if you need or have any questions, you can come to anybody here. Rizel, B. Dougie, Anthony, they'd all be willing to answer questions you have or point you in the right direction when it comes to Hacktoberfest and open source. So hit them up, don't overload them. All right, y'all.
00:59:35 - Anthony Campolo
All.
00:59:35 - Scott Steinlage
Love you guys so much. Thanks for joining us.
00:59:38 - Ishan Anand
Thank you.
00:59:39 - Scott Steinlage
Next time, we'll see you. All right, love you all. Until next time. See you later. Peace.