This year, Uplight was excited to participate in Hacktoberfest on October 13th and 14th. Hacktoberfest is an annual event hosted by DigitalOcean, where, for the whole month of October, open source community members are encouraged to give back to the community by completing pull requests. At Uplight, we use and benefit from many open source technologies in our day to day work, such as: the Python programming language, the Django web framework, devpi, Docker, and Git.
The event was organized by one of our engineers, Mariatta Wijaya, who is also serving as Hacktoberfest Advisory Council member. Mariatta herself is an avid open source contributor and maintainer, and is one of the Python core developers.
Eight engineers from Uplight signed up for Hacktoberfest. Participants were free to choose any open source project to contribute to. Most participants were new to open source contributions, so they spent their two days learning about the process, looking at open issues, and reading the project’s contribution guide. Uplight engineers worked on projects including Python Poetry, freeCodeCamp, and IVRE. During the two days, participants submitted six pull requests to the Poetry project.
It was quite a learning experience for our participants as they learned how to collaborate and communicate in the open source community. Contributing to open source is a different experience from our regular work at Uplight. One of our participants commented, “I appreciate the encouragement to work on open source projects. I’ve been meaning to start doing this for a while. Nice to have a little push.” Another one said, “I have always wanted to contribute to open source but didn’t know where to start. I like that the org is giving us time to contribute to open source.”
In addition to giving the time to contribute to open source projects, Uplight will also be donating $100 USD to six open source projects and maintainers as our token of appreciation including : IVRE, Signal, Python, Poetry, freeCodeCamp, and SQLAlchemy.
We would like to encourage other companies and organizations who are using open source software to also give back, by giving time to their employees to contribute to open source projects, and by donating to the open source projects that they depend on.
