While I enjoyed my first involvement with Hacktoberfest this year, I didn't end up completing enough pull request for the month. Partly this was due to a busy workload for the 9-5 job, but also I found that I wanted to find projects I could stay involved with.
Hacktoberfest did its job and got me more involved, more interested in contributing to open source projects on GiHub. I'd already done a first step back in Dec 18 on ollelauribostrom/rebus which is a great repository for your first attempt at a pull request. So I was ready to find some more projects I could help with.
To begin with I tried to just find anything that would get me across the line, but the fist project was really just an open repository to submit any code to help get 4 pull requests. Not really what's intended, and a few of these were (rightly) getting excluded from the competition.
The second one was valid, and gave me a better feeling of accomplishment when submitting the pull request, but that also made me more focussed on finding something that I could not only help with, but that I could have some continued interest in.
I know that in a lot of projects any help is appreciated, and that full support of the whole project is not really required, as long as you can help solve the issue, add the feature..... But I think I spent most of my time searching for that elusive project. One that was not only looking for help but was something that would be longer term than just one pull request.
I'm thinking the only way to find these projects is time, getting involved in open source by helping any project you can, and somewhere along the way one will appear that really takes your focus. Or perhaps, over time, a project you contribute to will become something more to you.
Hacktoberfest is a great idea. It got me contributing, and keen to try again next year, but I hope to keep its intent rolling through the year.
My thanks to DigitalOcean and DEV for the incentive.
