Intro
Hey people! I hope you're doing well if not just go to sleep, maybe today's not your day, so try again tomorrow 🙃.
Alright so this blog as per the title is about my HacktoberFest experience, this was my first time participating. Sit back, relax, and experience HacktoberFest from my POV.
How I got to know about it?
I heard about HacktoberFest in my first year in 2019, I used to think it was something related to hacking and stuff, and yeah my thoughts were the same for the hackathons 😂. So I never really explored these things back then.
This year around the end of August, I just randomly thought let's see what this HacktoberFest is. Yep in my final year, I recently started learning about tech stuff actively.
And yeah all my myths were broken, I was a little angry about why the f people call them HacktoberFest and Hackathons when we're not actually hacking stuff. The moment when I realized what they were actually I was a little angry but it sure was a funny moment.
All right enough talk about me, let's talk about my contributions in this HacktoberFest!
My Experience
All PRs are pretty basic and include non-code contributions too as I'm a beginner. 🙃
For all the PRs l made, I first opened an issue, got the maintainer's approval to work on the issue, and then made my PR. This is a good practice. ✅
PR #1 - (Added A Favicon)
So there's this project by Yashika which links all the awesome resources for frontend dev in one place. I know some HTML, CSS, and JS, So I thought this project would be an easy one to start with.
I saw there was no favicon added to the website, so I just used a resource mentioned on her project (pretty useful website IMO) to find a favicon that matches the theme of the website and made my PR.
PR #2 - (Make The Project Community Standard Compliant)
I saw this post by Eddie Jaoude where he mentioned checking if a repo is satisfying community standards or not.
So there is this project yast which stands for "Yet Another Streaming Tool". I was planning to contribute to this project, as the maintainer of this project helped me learn Golang over Discord a while back, around mid-September or a little before. The repo did not have templates for pull requests and Issues, and they should be there to make a repo community standard compliant so I just added them.
Resources I referred to - This and some other people's repos to see how they have written their templates.
PR #3 - (Added Relevant Link To Follow Us Buttons)
This 3rd contribution was also on Yashika's project, someone had created follow buttons for Linkedin, Twitter, and GitHub, but there were no links attached to them. So I added relevant links to those buttons. Pretty simple stuff.
PR #4 - (Added Notes For WSL2 Users And Support Files)
The final PR was made also on yast. Now, this PR had me sweating, it looked simple but was a gnarly one, it was a non-code contribution but involved about 8 days of research, cause I did not know a lot of stuff.
So I started with an issue where I had to fix something with the output of the project but the project was not working on my Windows machine.
I mentioned this to the maintainer.
Then I found out that there are some more issues when running the project through WSL2 too.
After about 2-3 days of discussion, 2 new issues were opened by the maintainer.
New issues were around trying to run the project on Windows directly and via WSL2.
So now I started working on these two issues, and it was chaos 😂.
At the end, I added a note and support file mentioning the challenges of why we can't currently run the project on Windows and WSL2 and what we will be doing to fix them.
Working on these issues was pretty fun and slightly frustrating too tbh 😄, but when I look back I did enjoy the whole process. From knowing nothing to finally figuring out stuff.
End
It was fun I learned a lot, and all in all, it was a good experience. 10/10 would do something like this again. Although I made around 8 PRs in total, these were the first 4 to get selected.
And I finally got these cool badges.
So this was my experience, would like to join as a maintainer next year and help other people to get started with open-source.
Special thanks to: -
Shubh Karman Singh, I learned a lot from him and his project yast.
Whistle aka Abhay Taras, a community manager at Community Classroom's discord. This guy is awesome, knows about a lot of stuff, and has really good tech experience. Helped me resolve my git doubts and a lot of other stuff.