Well my first ever Hacktoberfest is now over. It was stressful at times, but I think that was mostly just because it was my first one. The main challenge throughout the month was finding issues to work on. Since this is a global event, you had to be quick and/or lucky to find a good issue that was both challenging but yet, not overwhelming for a beginner like myself.
Overall, I made four pull requests (PRs) over the course of the month. Which can be read about here:
- https://dev.to/alexsam29/hacktoberfest-week-1-first-pull-request-31ie
- https://dev.to/alexsam29/hacktoberfest-week-2-first-bug-fix-5ao3
- https://dev.to/alexsam29/hacktoberfest-week-3-enhancing-a-feature-3iin
- https://dev.to/alexsam29/hacktoberfest-week-4-finding-and-creating-issues-j79
I think I made good learning progress with my PRs. The first PR was just me getting into the swing of things and getting used to contributing to a public open-source project. The second PR is where I actually got to put some coding skills to the test by fixing an existing bug in a project. It gave me some experience researching potential fixes to bugs that weren't my own creation. The third PR allowed me to continue with my work on the same project and gave me the opportunity to enhance a feature of the project. It was challenging as I had to brainstorm potential solutions that would give me the enhancement I was looking for. The fourth and final PR, while simple coding wise, gave me experience exploring different types of projects and tech stacks that I probably would not have explored had I not been participating in Hacktoberfest. The fact that it was challenging to find good issues to work on forced me to explore many projects to create a new issue myself. This gave me a good learning experience as I had to read and learn about many types of tech stacks in order to get a good understanding of the project, so that I could create an issue in the repository.
Overall, Hacktoberfest gave me the confidence to put myself out there and not to be afraid of contributing to open-source projects. No matter your experience level or how easy or difficult an issue is, every contribution is a learning experience.
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