On October 21st & 22nd 2022 I attended a hackathon with the Umbraco community. Throughout the 2 days community members and Umbraco HQ team members joined with the aim of contributing to open source and collaboration.
We started off by saying hellos to old and new friends over lunch time. The hackathon was a collaboration between Umbraco and Candid Contributions (a podcast Emma, Laura, Lotte and I co host). We didn't know if it would be just us attending, but were happy to see folks (aswell as some friendly cats & dogs) join us throughout the day!
We had a "getting started with contributing" agenda item to show how to get started with the Umbraco repo and contributing their own changes. Experienced contributors noted how it's much more accessible and easier to get the Umbraco source code running now than in previous versions, which is great news for getting more folks involved in open source! I re-joined in the evening and made some changes to Umbraco documentation based on the request from Umbraco for updates to the readability.
We re-joined on Saturday bright and early and watched an introduction video to Playwright together, I would really recommend this as a starting point if you are looking to use Playwright tests in contributing to Umbraco. From here some of us looked to contribute to Umbraco's Playwright tests, which was great to watch the workflow of building tests. I then took this as an opportunity to learn more about Playwright and start a new project with some example tests for this blog.
Shout out to Lotte for the amazing work on the "pumpkin patch" guestbook 🎃. The pumpkins appear based on pull requests to a GitHub repo by attendees. The size of the pumpkins is based on the number of PRs! As you can see, quite a few contributions were made to Umbraco repos in the time period of the event. Big thank you to Seb from HQ who was online to support and merge PRs throughout the whole time 🙌
As mentioned on my hacktoberfest goals blog post, there are now maintainers accepting low/ no code contributions, including Umbraco. This includes blogs, videos and hosting events!
As always with the previous hackathons, there is a mix of super productive coding time and social time catching up with friends. A shared discord playlist and discussing our plans for Saturday night TV (strictly for me) is always the nice balance of serious coding and friendly atmosphere I enjoy at Umbraco events.
If you haven't attended a hackathon, in person or virtual, I would recommend it for a great way to learn and collaborate. Here's hoping we have another opportunity to hack together soon.
Happy Hacking 👋👩💻