Hacktoberfest’25 Journey :)
Ram Ram!
Hacktoberfest’25 Journey :)
Ram Ram!
This October I finally completed Hacktoberfest 2025!
I had registered last year as well but couldn’t complete it then. This time, I made it!
In this post, I’ll share my journey, what I learned, and the mistakes I made along the way :
I wasn’t really nervous because I already knew the basics of Git, GitHub, pull requests, and open source. I had made a few contributions before. But the real challenge I faced was running the project locally.
This step is super important if you can’t set up the project on your own system, there’s a very small chance your PR will get merged, even if you change just one line directly on GitHub. Maintainers often ask contributors to test their changes, and you can only do that if the project runs locally.
Good repositories usually have installation guides and active communities on Discord or Slack, where you can ask for help. And here’s something I learned you don’t need to understand the entire codebase to fix an issue. It’s better to focus on the specific part of the problem you’re solving. Usually, you only need to explore a few files to figure out where to make your changes.
Here’s a little story of what I worked on this year.
StudioCMS
I made two contributions to StudioCMS, a modern open-source CMS.
- Improving Avatar Loading Performance I worked on optimizing how user avatars load in the dashboard. Earlier, the avatars were verified on the server side, which caused slow rendering and flashes of missing content. My fix moved the verification and loading to the client side, added smooth fade-in animations, and made the page feel instantly responsive no more loading delays!
- Removing the “Hide Index Page” Setting This was a cleanup and refactor task. The setting to “Hide Index Page from the dashboard” had become unnecessary, so I removed it from the UI while keeping backward compatibility in the code. It felt good to simplify the interface and improve the user experience a little.
Both PRs involved active discussions with maintainers and even bots like CodeRabbit {it’s also generate poem :)}
Neo.mjs
Neo.mjs was one of the most technically interesting projects I contributed to and in this project also made two contributions.
- Enhanced Component Lifecycle Handling
Improved the
destroy()method of thefunctional.component.Baseclass to make it more efficient. This prevented unnecessary virtual DOM updates and aligned the logic with other base components.
- Creating a Test Plan for the Password Field
As part of the Hacktoberfest Cookbook initiative, I wrote a detailed test plan for the
Passwordfield component — covering behavior, accessibility, validation, and future testing strategies.
Sugar Labs
I also made a small UI contribution to Sugar Labs.
I updated the social media icons on their website’s “Contact Us” section to use the official brand SVGs for Medium, Mastodon, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Comma.ai
For Comma.ai’s website, I worked on a feature that automatically opens the FAQ section based on the URL hash.
It was a fun Svelte project — I learned how to use $page.url.hash from Svelte’s store instead of relying on manual DOM logic. After a few iterations and helpful review comments from the maintainers, it finally got merged!
Still Open PRs
Apart from the merged ones, I still have some open pull requests in:
- Tagia UI
- Weam AI
- Opstimate
Some of these got review comments and discussions going, and I plan to continue improving them even after Hacktoberfest. The best part of open source is that it’s never “done” — there’s always something to learn and refine.
What I Learned
Hacktoberfest wasn’t just about getting PRs merged. It was about learning how open source really works reading other people’s code, following contribution guidelines, understanding review feedback, and collaborating asynchronously with developers around the world.
I also learned to stay patient not every PR gets merged immediately, and that’s okay. The important thing is to keep learning and contributing.
Final Thoughts
Completing Hacktoberfest 2025 has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my developer journey so far.
I met friendly maintainers, learned best practices, and made my first meaningful open-source impact.
If you’re someone who’s been thinking about conributing in open-source but hasn’t yet just start. Pick a repo, read through issues, and make your first small PR. It might feel scary at first, but trust me, it’s totally worth it.
Thank You :)
Connect With Me
- Github — https://github.com/ad1tyayadav
- X — https://x.com/_its_Adi
- LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya-yadav-39b20529a/`
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