What Hacktoberfest 2025 Taught Me About Community, Code, and Growth
A bittersweet end to a wonderful experience
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last wrote something here. Life got busy, but in the best way. I’ve been focusing on personal growth, leadership, and most of all, on building and empowering my community.
Women Devs SG has always been the space where I feel most connected. It’s the safest place I know to share knowledge, learn from others, and grow together. I’ve always wanted to help people unlock their potential, and this year, Hacktoberfest felt like the perfect way to do that.
I believe open source is for everyone. It’s collaborative, creative, and full of learning opportunities. I wanted our community to experience that energy and discover how much impact they can make by contributing. So in this article, let me share my Hacktoberfest experience!
My Hacktoberfest Experience
This year’s Hacktoberfest was extra special because it was my first time participating as a maintainer. I got to work with an incredible team of maintainers who made everything so much fun to coordinate.
In the weeks leading up to it, we worked hard to get our projects ready and to spread the word within the community. A big shoutout to our volunteer Natasha, who contributed 3 of her own projects for Hacktoberfest. We’re so grateful for her initiative and generosity!
Check out all our repos at our GitHub organization page: https://github.com/Women-Devs-SG
The next project we opened up was our WomenDevsSG website, which made the whole experience even more meaningful, as our website is a place for women technologists, allies, non-coders from any level of experience to try their hand at open source!
I was very excited about this new 30-day initiative. I even started a new routine around it, checking notifications early in the morning, assigning issues, reviewing PRs, and coordinating with maintainers. You can peek into that routine here.
As the main driver of the initiative, my goal was to make sure maintainers didn’t feel overloaded while still keeping things moving. I also wanted everyone to have the chance to work on issues they found interesting. It was a lot of coordination, but watching everything come together was so rewarding.
Besides the code, there was also a lot of coordination for our promotion material and schedule. After all, my goal for this Hacktoberfest are:
Introduce WDS volunteers and members to Open Source
Create traction and visibility on our open source projects
Promote our organization and our mission to empower women in tech
Thus, promotion is a must and we want to spread the word to as many contributors, tech communities (local & global) and leaders as possible. After making over 30 promotional banners, it’s safe to say that I’ve become somewhat of a social media marketer too at this period of time haha!
What I Learned as a First-Time Maintainer
Being a maintainer for the first time taught me so much, not just about code or processes, but about people and community. Here are a few lessons that stuck with me.
1. Review PRs with GitHub Codespaces
Starting the list off with something light, this is an underrated feature in GitHub but being able to review PRs thanks to Codespaces providing a consistent, cloud-hosted development environment directly within the browser is such a life changer!
If you have read my How to Increase Developer Productivity with Codespaces, you already know how much I use it for collaboration and quick testing. The same convenience applies when reviewing PRs. Everything is ready to go, you can test changes instantly, and it feels seamless from start to finish!
2. It’s about people, not just code
Communication is the number one skill when it comes to collaborating with people from all over the world.
In WomenDevsSG, we wanted to make sure Hacktoberfest aligned with our mission to empower women in tech. During the first week, we noticed many contributors requesting issue assignments. Most of them were not women, and while we welcomed everyone’s contributions, we were concerned about creating space for women who might feel hesitant or unsure about jumping into open source.
To address this, we introduced a "women-devs-only" label. This label helps us hold space for women who may not yet feel confident taking on an open source challenge, giving them a supportive environment to learn and contribute at their own pace.
We are also very grateful for the male allies in our community who understand our mission. With simple communication and a shared understanding, we were able to ensure that every contributor could participate in the way that works best for them, while still holding space for women who needed it.
Shoutout to this GitHub user @Muneer320 for kindly giving up issues assigned with “women-devs-only” for our community’s mission!
3. Clarity matters
Clear contributing guidelines, feedback and well-written issues make a huge difference. They empower contributors to jump in confidently and reduce confusion for everyone.
My favourite colour has become purple because something is merged! Yay every merge is a milestone achieved for a contributor!
4. Find balance
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and try to respond to every PR instantly, but it’s important to pace yourself. A healthy balance keeps things sustainable for maintainers and contributors alike. There’s been a few times when I can’t respond as quickly as this initiative is outside my 9 to 5. I’m thankful that our contributors were understanding about it!
There were quite a few hilarious moments in our maintainers group as we were all too passionate about this! Sometimes, even more than our 9 to 5, we joked our 5 to 9 keeps us going!
Just look at my team working on this at 3am in the mornings on Fridays and weekends
All in all, despite it being pretty hilarious when calling each other out for overworking, it is still important that we take care of ourselves the entire period of this month. As I would assign PRs to my maintainers team, I would do check-ins with them to make sure that they are not feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work they had to do.
5. Recognition goes a long way
A small thank you or shoutout can really motivate contributors. For many first-timers, that little bit of encouragement means everything.
Shoutout to our super contributor @CBID2 for creating over 5 PRs for our repo! 🙏
Conclusion
Hacktoberfest reminded me why I love building communities. It’s about creating spaces where people can learn, grow, and make meaningful contributions together.
As Hacktoberfest comes to an end, I can’t help but feel a quiet mix of gratitude and nostalgia. Seeing everyone come together, learning, contributing, and cheering each other on reminded me why I started all this in the first place. It’s not about the commits or the repos but more about the people, the spark of confidence that grows when someone realizes they belong here too.
If you’ve been curious about open source, consider this your sign to start. It’s not just about the code. It’s about connection, collaboration, and the joy of building something together. Do check out our Women Devs SG projects to contribute! Even though Hacktoberfest is over, we still want to empower our community to help them get started with open source!
We had a lot of contributors who are very new to open source and GitHub in general. Our issues are designed to be very beginner-friendly that even non-technical contributors managed to get their PR merged with our feedback and guidance!
Last but not least, another HUGE shoutout to all the WomenDevsSG maintainers for taking the time out of their personal time to review, guide and merge PRs every day for the past 30 days!
Also, check out one of my maintainers experience of participating in open source for the first time! She’s an amazing part of our team! Article below 👇
