Hacktoberfest 2020

In 2019 I had the good fortune to get to write open source code for work. Almost our entire team participated in Hacktoberfest, as it was basically getting paid to write open source code and get a free T-Shirt to boot. Ironically half of my pull requests were reverting previous commits that I had made.

This year I'm no longer getting paid to write open source code, so I had to actually think about what PRs to make. While I spend a good chunk of my weekends writing code, it's generally for one off hobby projects where I'm the sole contributor, and branching only makes sense for longer running experiments; generally I'm just committing directly to master.

I knew I wanted to update my site-crawler site to support scraping more than one type of website/book so that I could add another book, but coming up with the other two PRs proved more challenging. I didn't want to just cheese things with updates to readmes, but I didn't have another project that fit into discernable PR chunks (as opposed to spending a couple weeks on a larger branch).

In the end I decided to redo the roman numerals kata in Kotlin, and actually complete it. This chunked nicely into PRs and gave me the two I needed for Hacktoberfest, plus a couple extra. Finally, near the end of the month, I added a final PR for better collision in my platformer experiment/game Vex.