The Hacktoberfest 2017

As a lot of you already know, the Hacktoberfest is a recurring annual event, sponsorized by DigitalOcean and GitHub, which has the purpose to promote the contribution to open source projects.

I took the opportunity to partecipate to this event by doing it live on my Twitch channel. I decided to split the day in two parts, the morning and the afternoon. I started at the 10:00 AM an I tried to organize the morning session as follow:

  • A time boxed activity (about 1 hour) with the goal to find some open source projects where contribute in
  • 2 hours of programming session in order to try to fix some issues on the projects we found at the first step

The project I found was ElixirStatus-Web that is a micro-blogging platform about Elixir resources.

The morning session ended at 1:00 PM.

After the lunch, I started the afternoon session at 3:00 PM and I continued to do stream for other 3 hours.

During the 3 hours I continued to make some little changes in order to contibute to this project and the final result was three pull-request:

At the end of the streaming session the experience was really satisfying but at the same time really tiring:

Why really satisfying?

  • The viewers: It’s always good to talk with the viewers, interact and learn with them. Some viewers helped me to better understand some points of the project! I love to have interactions with the viewers, thank you folks :)
  • The project: I had the opportunity to take a project and learn a lot about the programming language (Elixir) itself and a framework (Phoenix framework)
  • At the end I pushed three pull-requests! :)

Why really tiring?

  • Doing a full-day long streaming session trying to talk continuously in order to describe what I am doing or answer to viewers is very very very very challenging, at the end of the day I clearly remember that I had no voice :/
  • Keep the focus is not easy cause after two or more hours the threshold attention go drastically down. I tried to use the pomodoro technique so that I had a 5 minutes break each 25 minutes of programming session.

Final thoughts

In general what I can say is that this was an awesome experience. I thought more than once that - maybe - a day I could go for a full-time streaming 5 days a week / 8 hours a day with the following content:

  • Share the good practices of software development
  • Improve the programming discipline
  • Contribute to open source projects
  • Learn a lot of new stuff (programing language, technologies and other)

Anyway I will continue to find a way to make it real!

Thank you all for watching me! See you on Twitch!