It already starts tomorrow… the next edition of “Hacktoberfest”. For those who don’t know, it basically is an initiative that incentivizes participants to contribute to open-source software.
During the month of October, those who do 4 contributions or more, can either receive a t-shirt or opt for a tree to be planted in their name.
While the last editions seem to have been plagued with spam problems (as in “low-value contributions”), I still think it is an important initiate. Perhaps raising the bar for participation or completion would prevent these issues, but that is not the point of this post.
Having already participated twice in the past, this year I will try to do it again (as you might have guessed from the post’s title).
With this in mind, I spent a “few minutes” looking at my currently active/maintained repositories to see which ones could make use of a few extra contributions (the others will probably be archived).
Here are the ones I ended up enabling for the “event”:
- hawkpost – This old project that is still used, allows you to receive content in a secure end-to-end way from people without any encryption knowledge. Nowadays, there are better alternatives, but in some use cases it still is useful. The project has been unmaintained for a while and the idea for the next month is to upgrade its dependencies, fix the CI, improve the documentation and bring it to shape by making a new release.
- inlinehashes – is a small CLI tool that takes an HTML document and produces the hashes of all inline elements that would need to be whitelisted in the Content-Security-Policy. Currently, the project only looks for styles and some places where JavaScript can be used. In the next month it would be good to extend the project’s coverage such as other inline JS possibilities, objects, etc.
- worker-planet – Is a “Cloudflare Worker” that generates a single web page/feed with content from multiple sources. It is useful for communities where each member publishes content using his own blog/website. During the next month, it would be useful to include a few extra themes (and better ones).
- worker-ddns – An elementary DDNS solution built on top of Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare DNS. This project is very stable and could be considered complete, so I’m not expecting any significant changes. However, documentation could be improved, and we could also address systems that don’t support an agent written in python.
Of course there are other improvements that could be made to all them, but these are my “priorities”.
If you are participating on Hacktoberfest and still don’t know where to start, please give the above project’s a shot.