Happy Hacktober

What's that? You've never heard of Hacktober? Me either! Well, that is until yesterday, October 1st.

Apparently Hacktober (like all the other 'tober' events the internet has suddenly come up with) has quietly become a month-long event where software developers contribute to coding projects outside of their daily workload.

DigitalOcean (in partnership with Dev.to) has even begun hosting an annual remote Hacktoberfest event to encourage developers to contribute to open source projects. After opening 4 pull requests on public repositories, they'll send you a limited edition t-shirt and some stickers, because we all know developers love stickers. If you're the maintainer of an open source repository you can also join in on the fun by applying a "Hacktoberfest" label to your open Github issues so others can contribute to them.

I first heard the term 'Hacktober', a couple years ago Facebook started holding an event to help promote Cybersecurity awareness for it's employees. This all makes much more sense now that I work for a cybersecurity awareness training company and have learned that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (#NCSAM).

So what are my plans for the new month long holiday?

I'm glad you asked! I'm hoping that I can dedicate each week to a different subject. Seeing that I've only had about 16 hours to think about it, I'll just throw out some of the early ideas I have...

• Update my two recent open source libraries that I have (ReactWaves and ClippPlayer). Specifically by upgrading their dependencies to the new version of Wavesurfer.js. Then hopefully add support to a few additional plugins.
• I've recently had this idea to build this 'gamification service' that allows you to setup rules and then triggers when a user performs a particular action, or a time period passes. It may not be very feasible, especially in a week, but we could also use it at my new job, so win-win!
• Since I just released my new project Clipps, there's endless amounts of work to do over there. Since I'd like to work on something outside of my typical tasks, I may experiment with adding a new 'podcast builder' feature that I've been dreaming up. Again, pretty ambitious to achieve in a week, but if I could at least get started, it's better than nothing.
• Sticking with the Clipps theme, I've been wanting to use the backend of that as an excuse to finally write a React Native app. I think the browser version is far enough along that I can use that as a template on how I want to layout a mobile app. The perfect excuse to finally try mobile development!

So what do you think? Will you be participating in 'hacktober' this year?

Tweet me and let me know what you're going to build!

Live footage of me during Hacktober

Because obviously the real reason it's Hacktober...