I Found Out About Hacktoberfest Two Days Late

Hacktoberfest 2026 wrapped up on 31 October.

I found out it existed on 2 November.

In true fashion, that’s two days late, for an event that ran for a month, in a world I’ve only just moved into. I’ve spent twenty-eight years in IT, but almost none of my work was public. Open source is new to me. I’m still learning the ropes, and apparently one of the ropes is a calendar.

So no badge, no registration, nothing official. What I do have is an October that, looking back, was the busiest month of open source I’ve ever had. If you took part this year, this is my late, unofficial, slightly sheepish entry. Had I known, I’d have crushed it.

Conn3x: One Week Old

The one I can't stop talking about

Conn3x is an IaCC tool: infrastructure as code and configuration management in one. Today most of us provision with Terraform, configure with Ansible, and keep a drawer of glue scripts holding the two together. Conn3x does both from one binary, with one plan and one state. It’s open source under MPL-2.0 and built on OpenTofu.

It has been live for about a week. The first release, v0.1.0, went out on 25 October. By 1 November it was on v0.6.12, after 18 releases. Yes, eighteen in eight days. When something’s that young, every day finds a rough edge, and I’d rather sand it off today than write it down for later.

What surprised me was the circuits. A circuit is a reusable package of setup for a piece of software, and between 27 and 31 October the org grew to 97 of them, from Nginx and Postgres to k3s, Grafana and WireGuard. Those circuit repos picked up 82 stars between them, and six people other than me have already shipped code to Conn3x and its website.

Here’s the bit I’ll say out loud: we aim to make Conn3x a gold standard DevOps tool by next year. It’s a week old, so that’s an aim, not a forecast. Come and help me hit it.

Netweir: The Scraper That Kept Shipping

537 commits in a month

Netweir is a web scraper where Rust does the work and you write Python. It went live on 10 October and had a loud first month: 537 commits, 196 merged pull requests and six releases. It’s on v0.7.1 as I write this. If you’re coming from Scrapy, I wrote up the move last week.

Two people beyond me have code in Netweir now. That’s two more than it had on 1 October, when it didn’t exist.

Everything Else I Shipped

October was busier than I remembered

Writing this post was the first time I added it all up, and it’s a bit much:

• Sentrello is my self-hosted business platform. It isn’t new this month, but it kept going: 282 commits and 38 releases.
• TicketSlinger is open-source ticket selling, started on 13 October. 110 commits and five releases so far.
• TachyonCMS is a headless CMS in Rust. One pull request alone added blocks and rich text: 16,340 lines across 53 files.
• sentry-v2 watches pressure, failed units and SELinux denials on Rocky Linux 10, and applies reversible, time-boxed fixes before the OOM killer has to. 100 commits and 11 releases, plus code from two people who aren’t me.
• aegis-v2 does runtime threat detection with eBPF and Rust. 64 commits and six releases.
• githard started on 26 October. It’s two commits old, so ask me about it next year.

Projects I Helped That Aren’t Mine

Every one of my projects stands on somebody else's

This is the part of open source I didn’t see coming, and I like it best. Your tools are built on other people’s tools, and those people could use a hand.

So I gave some back. On 14 October I opened five pull requests on simple-site, and all five were merged: new structure and styling, a proper contact form, a CSS reset, and a README update. On Presidio, I reviewed a fix for an allow list that was quietly dropping real findings, and I reproduced a second bug, finding terms the planned fix couldn’t compile before it was sent.

Then Conn3x started giving back too. Every circuit wraps someone else’s project, so in the last few days of October we spent around three hours testing and reproducing things for the projects underneath:

• Trivy: tested a new install checksum against a real release, found a pin that silently dropped when set before sudo, then retested at the author’s request.
• Velociraptor: built before and after to confirm a bug was fixed on master, so a maintainer could close the issue.
• OpenSCAP: ran real scans to reproduce two bugs and confirm both fixes.
• k3s: two small finds in the install script on a fapolicyd host, and why a kernel config check didn’t fire on Linux 6.18.
• audit-userspace: the reproduction a maintainer asked for.
• LiteLLM: traced a reported 404 through the code to a likely cause.

None of that is glamorous. A clean reproduction is still the most useful thing you can hand a maintainer, and it’s how I’m learning how other projects really run.

The Numbers

And who actually did the work

You came for stats, so here they are, honestly. Across my projects in October (commits, pull requests and releases leave out the 97 circuit repos; stars and forks don’t):

• 1,443 commits
• 805 merged pull requests
• 84 releases
• 113 stars and 22 forks across everything

Now the confession. Most of those 805 pull requests are me talking to myself, plus the odd dependabot bump. Exactly 32 came from other people. And 82 of those 113 stars sit on Conn3x circuit repos, not on the headline projects.

But that’s 32 pull requests from other people, on projects that didn’t exist on 1 October. That’s the number I’m proudest of.

Read the infographic as text

• The hook: Hacktoberfest ended on 31 October. I heard about it on 2 November. So no badge, no registration, no official anything, just a month of shipping that happened to land on the right dates. Next year I’ll be ready.
• Conn3x, live about one week. An IaCC tool: infrastructure as code and configuration management in one. First release v0.1.0 on 25 Oct, latest v0.6.12 on 1 Nov. 97 circuit repos, created 27–31 Oct, and 82 of the 113 stars across everything sit on them. 18 releases, 17 of them in October. 6 contributors other than me, across the core repo and conn3x.org. 170 commits and 168 merged PRs on the core repo, another 124 merged PRs on the website.
• Netweir, live since 10 Oct. An ultra-fast, self-healing, undetectable web scraper; Rust does the work, you write Python. Repo created 9 Oct, first release the next day, latest v0.7.1. In October: 537 commits, 196 merged PRs (two from people who aren’t me), 6 releases, 6 stars, 3 forks, 2 contributors (Aaqibhafeezkhan and bfs2021).
• Also shipped. Sentrello, created 28 Sep so it kept shipping rather than launched: 282 commits, 38 releases, 13 stars. TicketSlinger, created 13 Oct: 110 commits, 109 merged PRs, 5 releases. TachyonCMS, created 12 Oct: 31 commits, 1 release, 3 stars, and one PR of +16,340 lines across 53 files. aegis-v2, created 19 Oct: 64 commits, 6 releases, 1 fork. sentry-v2, created 14 Oct: 100 commits, 11 releases, 3 forks. githard, created 26 Oct: 2 commits.
• Gave back, 8 other people’s projects. simple-site: 5 merged PRs on 14 Oct (HTML structure, contact form, CSS reset, README). presidio: reviewed PR #2417 and reproduced issue #2433. trivy: tested install checksum PR #11494, found a pin dropped before sudo, retested. velociraptor: confirmed issue #5109 fixed on master. openscap: two fixes reproduced and confirmed. k3s: the install script on a fapolicyd host and a kernel config check on Linux 6.18. audit-userspace: a reproduction a maintainer asked for. litellm: traced a Langfuse 404, issue #43032. About three hours of this was the Conn3x giving-back run on 29–31 Oct.
• The honest totals, October, circuit repos not counted: 1,443 commits and 805 merged PRs, mostly me talking to myself. 32 of the 805 came from people other than me and the bots. 84 releases. 113 stars, 82 of them on circuit repos and 31 on everything else. 22 forks. 9 outside contributors. Nearly every repo was created in October, so today’s star and fork totals are, in practice, October’s.
• The 9 people who showed up, everyone with a commit on one of my projects who isn’t me: Aaqibhafeezkhan (Netweir), bfs2021 (Conn3x, Netweir and sentry-v2), Dodothereal (Conn3x), coderbhawesh (Conn3x core and web), dannyward630 (Conn3x), agammann, jay23606 and sahithib20 (conn3x.org), snehaapratap (sentry-v2).

The Nine Who Showed Up

Thank you, genuinely

These nine people shipped code to my projects this month. Every one of them chose to spend their time on projects that were weeks, or days, old. Thank you:

• Aaqibhafeezkhan
• agammann
• bfs2021, who turned up on Conn3x, Netweir and sentry-v2
• coderbhawesh
• dannyward630
• Dodothereal
• jay23606
• sahithib20
• snehaapratap

I’m hoping this list is a lot longer next October. If you’d like to be on it, Conn3x and Netweir are both open and happy to have you. New circuits are a good first contribution, and so is telling me what’s broken.

Next Year, I’ll Be Ready

Calendar reminder pending

I missed Hacktoberfest 2026 by two days. That’s fine. It means my first real one is still ahead of me, and by then Conn3x and Netweir will have had a year to grow.

I’ll register on time. Probably. If you took part this year, I’d love to hear what you built, and if you fancy a head start on next October, come and break something of mine.