There's many things that I hope to get out of Hacktoberfest this year

There's no secret that I really enjoy Hacktoberfest. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll see that the entire month of October is nearly reserved for talking about Hacktoberfest.

This year marks my third year participating in Hacktoberfest and it is something I am very proud of. Because of this event, I've started teaching myself Python, R, and started dabbling in Ruby. I entirely have this holiday to thank for giving me the kick in the pants to start coding.

Last year marked the introduction of a little project I called the Hacktoberfest Swag List. Once I realized that Microsoft and SendGrid were offering their own t-shirts and stickers to people who helped out in their own GitHub repos, I made a very simple public list so I could keep track of it all and asked for others to contribute.

My goal shifted from simply providing me with a list of swag to providing everyone with a list, particularly targeted at people new to coding who wanted to feel a sense of accomplishment for helping companies they know and use.

To accomplish this goal, I experimented with turning the list into a GitHub Pages site powered by Jekyll. That then lead to me learning how to use Netlify to host a website, how to setup Jekyll as a static site generator locally, learning how to better my Markdown coding with CodeClimate, what the heck an IDE is and how to use something like Codeanywhere to help me make my code better, how to configure webhooks, and how to be a manager in charge of a public project that people relied upon.

I've learned a great deal and I entirely have Hacktoberfest to thank.

So, for this year, I intend to continue doing what I can to promote the Hacktoberfest Swag List and help new people get into contributing to open-source code. I also selfishly will use this time to better myself and continue to learn and grow as an individual.

To those participating in Hacktoberfest for the first time, welcome! To those who are veterans, spread the word! Register for the official event, read about how to participate, and be proud of the work you do to make the world a better place.