Because of Hacktoberfest, the Grommet GitHub repository has been as lively as a Biergarten in Germany these past few weeks. For those of you who don’t know, Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration aimed at encouraging coders of all backgrounds and skill levels worldwide to contribute to open source software. In only the first sixteen days, coders from all over submitted 54 commits to the Grommet code base. With the help of seventeen Hacktoberfest rockstar contributors, we got to a point where 93% of our storybook examples are React hook-friendly and more than a dozen Grommet components had been refactored to use hooks!

The issue that had the most traffic was Refactoring components and stories to use hooks. The ability to use hooks has recently been added to React and is proving to be very popular because it solves a number of issues. Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React state and lifecycle features from function components. Hooks don’t work inside classes — they let you use React without classes. This issue alone attracted more than 50 pull requests (PRs) and helps make Grommet a React framework that is super edgy.

Developers also tackled issues of TypeScript, layout, and the implementation of best practices and standards. Some were bug fixes, but many more were enhancements to the code. You can find all the issues on the Grommet Hacktoberfest repository. As the HPE Experience Studio senior engineer and open source developer, I couldn’t be happier with the engagement we received around this October event run by DigitalOcean and DEV design.

For those of you unfamiliar with Grommet, it is a React-based library of reusable UI components that help developers and designers create web applications. This open source UI development and design tool simplifies the way web applications are built by providing a package of commonly used interface elements from which developers and designers can choose to use. To keep up to date with everything that’s going on with Grommet, make sure you connect with us on Slack. Or, check out the HPE DEV portal to learn more about the Grommet platform.