Today is October 1 and it’s Hacktoberfest season again.

Seeing this repository, feels like flipping through an old photo album. I’ve been quiet on GitHub for a while now, but this month always brings me right back to the incredible effort we put in during Hacktoberfest 2021 while I was a Leadership Fellow with WomenWhoCode.

That year, I was leading the Frontend Group as an WomenWhoCode Leadership Fellow and one of my initiatives was setting up a cohort for open source contributions. I remember the weekly wrap-ups tracking our progress, hitting an impressive 25 merged Pull Requests within the first three weeks alone. It was collaborative, and ridiculously fun.

The best part wasn’t the numbers, though; it was the foundation I laid. 2021 was the year a lot of folks within my group finally got over the “open source is intimidating” hump. There was actionable advice beyond just “find a good issue.” It lowered the barrier to entry and made contributions accessible to everyone.

I had put together “The Opensource Chat Show 2021” It made the whole initiative feel personal to me.

Looking back from 2025, I realize that 2021 wasn’t just a month of coding; it was a snapshot of pure, unadulterated community energy. My GitHub contribution graph might be collecting dust today, but the principles of collaboration and the sheer excitement of seeing that first PR merged for a lot of folks are memories I’ll always cherish.

To all the contributors out there this year, especially the first-timers, have a fantastic month.Keep those PRs flowing!