Last year I already wrote about different initiatives in the period leading up to Christmas. In one of my talks this year, Level Up Your Team I've been discussing many ways of learning, and for this year I want to highlight one of the initiatives that I participated in last year, and again am trying again this year: 24 Pull Requests.

What is it?

The idea is that you send (at least) one pull request to an open source project in the days leading up to Christmas, starting on December 1st. The website will keep track of your progress and give you a list of suggested projects.

Why would you do it?

The most obvious reason is to contribute something to open source. If you, like me, earn most of your income by using open source code in your projects, this is most certainly a good reason to contribute to open source. But there's more...

When do you learn most? I learn most when I am challenged, when I am pushed out of my comfort zone. This is one of the reasons we get so much positive feedback for WeCamp, because we push people out of their comfort zone in every possible way. That same thing applies with 24 Pull Requests: You are forced to send a pull request to an open source project 24 days in a row. While they can be 24 PRs to the same project, it works better to have a look at the suggested projects and try to contribute to multiple projects, preferably ones that you don't know (that well).

Is it easy?

No. Not every project has a low hanging fruit or easy pick tag, and even if they have them, it may not be easy for someone new to the project/codebase. Also: Actually writing a PR every single day for 24 days is not easy. At least if your calendar is as busy as mine, it's not easy.

Actually last year, I completely failed. I can't find the actual stats anymore on the 24PullRequests website, but I think I sent maybe 5 or 6 pull requests. Time was mostly the reason for this failure, but I tried. And even though I didn't succeed in sending 24 pull requests, I did push myself to contribute to open source, and I did learn about some projects. For instance, I had not looked at Disco until last year. And this year, I've already contributed a simple typo to RMT, which I did not know until yesterday, and I've contributed a bugfix to Bolt, a CMS that I've been using a lot in the past year.

Join in!

So go ahead, start contributing!