My (first) Hacktoberfest journey

On early September 2021, I decided to get more involved in the open source world. Feeling a need to giveback a part of everything I've learned from others.

Neither confident of my coding skills nor of my english abilities, I had to work on my own fear of doing it bad. So I firstly published some repositories, then rapidly want to contribute elsewhere as it is the essence of open source.

First contribution

Where should I start as a firsttimer?

Google brought me here: https://www.firsttimersonly.com/

After understanding what is a fork, upstream, pull request etc... I looked for a good first issue, and finally found somewhere I could help: https://github.com/WordPress/openverse-frontend/issues/223.

I was as enthousiastic as stressed to open my first pull request, that I forgot a basic rule of courtesy.
Another first time contributor explicitly ask for working on this issue. Few hours later, I unintentionally, nonetheless shamely, short circuit his potential work with my first PR. 😳

I should just ask if anyone was already working on this issue before opening a PR.

How was your first contribution on Github?

Here is the first pull request of Mark Otto: https://firstpr.me/#mdo

First Hactoberfest

Thanks to dev.to and @ayushi7rawat I discovered what is Hacktoberfest.

An open source event at the same time of my first contributions sounds like an opportunity to stay focus on this learning journey. Otherwise, I like the idea of getting a 👕 or a 🌳!

Goal: 4 pull requests merged in the main branch of repositories labeled hacktoberfest.

First of all, I was lucky as the first project I contributed to, Openverse Frontend, takes part in the event. I had some landmarks in the codebase which helped me to get 3 PR merged.

At this moment, wanting to find another "playground", I scrolled indefinitely this page https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest?l=javascript. Axios, Chart.js, Meteor, Cypress... I didn't feel ready for that!

I was becoming lazy for the last missing PR. I naively thought that sharing a personal project into a Hacktoberfest labeled repository which reference others first time contributor projects was OK. But It is not regarding to Hacktoberfest values.

At least, it is ok to me to learn contributing process, and to put a light on a particular project!

Always lazy and always missing a PR, I finally received a notification of a merged PR on Public APIs. 🎉 4/4

What I learned?

Apart from coding aspect, I learned a lot:

• not being too shy and asking even if the question seems stupid
• new english words: sisyphean task, LGTM, FOSS
• more about Github process and workflow
• removing an extra blankspace, fixing a typo, adding a line in a README.md is enough to earn points
• there are no little contributions but a sum of ones that makes a huge one
• being more grateful to kind people sharing their knowledge, researches and time without counterpart

To my mind, this event was a great way to enforce skills and to discover many open source projects! ❤️