Hey, some of you that actually read my posts might know that I was participating in a month-long hackathon called oss.gg hosted bt Formbricks. It is basically a gamified version of Hacktoberfest.
In simple terms, you contribute with either code, articles, videos, feedback, design, or social media posts; depending on your quality of contributions, you get points from 50 to 1500. Each point is basically a ticket for a raffle with exciting prizes like Mac, iPhone, PS5, and much more.
So in this article, I will tell you guys my experience throughout this hackathon.
How it started:
I frequently contribute to unkey which was one of the participating companies in this hackathon. It was somewhere around the end of September. That's when I saw the test bug open on their repo.
https://github.com/unkeyed/unkey/issues/2132. Me being me. I started researching more into what oss.gg. That's when I discovered about this gamified version of Hacktoberfest.
When I saw my favorite repo participating in this hackathon. I knew had to participate too!
How it is going:
Unkey had a few open issues I was working on already. I quickly knocked off my first few contributions. Just a couple of days into October, I was already ranked #1. That's when I also wrote a fairly decent-sized API route for Unkey, which gave me around 300 points. It was a massive confidence boost for me.
But then I realized that there are SIX more repos participating in this hackathon. It is fairly hard to setup an entirely new codebase and make significant code contributions for them. So I decided to go ahead with non-code contributions for other repos and code contributions for Unkey.
That strategy worked like a charm. I was #1 even after 20 days of October.
When everything is going well, there has to be something that ruins it, right? This time it was my college exams. They had to ruin all the momentum I had in the hackathon. Fortunately, design side quests and developing templates for Unkey saved me one more time.
How it is going:
So I mentioned four things, right? Coding, designing, no-code, and writing. But till now I didn't finish ANY writing quests except for writing memes, lol. So here I am near the end of the hackathon, writing articles left and right. I try to keep them well researched, but they usually have typos or grammar mistakes. But I guarantee you that they are never AI-generated.
Anyways, so here I am trying my best to deliver good-quality articles.
If you are reading this on 28/29th of October, It is probably too late for you to start with code contributions. But you can definitely get 3-4k points within a day, or so check out https://oss.gg/side-quests on how you can do that. By the way, while I write this article, I am still first. Please hope I finish it here 🙏
Wrapping up:
Even though my article mentions being first on the leaderboard quite a few times. Let's not forget OSS is not about cutthroat competition and winning by all means possible. It is supposed to be a friendly competition.
Formbricks and Johannes have done an absolutely fantastic job keeping it that way. Usually these types of competitions get spammed a lot. I don't know how Formbricks managed to avoid bad eggs, but they definitely did a good job at that. I remember Mark (Founder of Papermark) taking things positively. Here is what he quoted on X after getting spammed:
Let's all of us keep a positive attitude like this and try to avoid spamming at all costs.
I think with that its time for me to wrap up. Hope you guys enjoyed reading my journey and this gamified version of hacktoberfest. Don't forget to check it out at https://oss.gg/