Grateful for Hacktoberfest!

Since Hacktoberfest started two weeks ago, we’ve seen a spike in traffic to Earthly. We saw developers of all levels coming together to improve our project in one way or another. Many developers didn’t know what Earthly was, so this was a great occasion for them to also get familiar with our reproducible builds.

Although there were a few obviously spammy PRs, most interactions were actually from legitimate developers, excited at the opportunity to contribute to open-source.

Here are some things that Hacktoberfest did for Earthly:

• Syntax highlighting for Sublime Text, including the work to host a package in Package Control
• Syntax highlighting for Vim, including installation scripts
• Adding support for a number of edge cases, like this autocomplete PR here
• Fixing typos and wording in our docs (real fixes, not spam)
• TONS of Earthly examples
• A bump in popularity

One of the reasons why contributions were very successful for us was also that we really took care about managing them. We replied within minutes to comments and pull requests (during work hours anyway), we set expectations about the required level of knowledge (you want to avoid beginners jumping on the gnarliest of issues) and we were welcoming in general.

Hacktoberfest is just getting started and we are looking forward to more contributions!