Ding-dong! The ghouls are gone and the season of Christmas begins; the month long Hacktoberfest wraps up, filled with learning, debugging and late night commits! 🎃
This year, I learned so much more through contributing to Open Source which I never got from just reading tutorials or doing personal projects. and honestly a big chunk of that credit goes to the Torc community.
(Before diving into my journey, check out Torc)
At the beginning of the month, my feed was full of posts from people on LinkedIn and Twitter buzzing about Hacktoberfest. Everyone seemed so ready and excited. And me? I was like, "Umm, nice... but where do I even start?" My calendar was already packed with other events so I didn't really have time to plan my contributions.
And that's where the magic of a good tech community kicks in. Around the second week of October, right when Hacktoberfest was in full swing I finally got a break and logged back in. That's when I discovered that Torc discord have a dedicated hacktoberfest channel, shout out to Jason Torres for creating the torctoberfest repo. And I got a place to start! My interest was back, but then came the real question: what do I contribute to?
The Beginning of torcReads
While scrolling through the channels I suddenly remembered, I hadn't even read the book we picked for our book club! That's when the idea hit me. Huge thanks to Angelos Katrantzis for starting the Torc Book Club; otherwise I might never have thought of this project in the first place!
The initial plan was simple: build a website to log the books we read each month in the club. But then my brain went "Wait, why not add more?" So I started adding features like study guides and monthly voting options. The frontend came out beautifully; Responsive, Clean and Minimalist. And guess what? My first two PRs got merged! Cool, right? 😎
After hosting it for testing, I realized something... Oops it is storing all the data locally! Which meant once deployed, everyone would see their own data. Total chaos incoming!
And here's the twist: I never worked with any backend before. So laptop on, a little googling, some brainstorming with Claude and a few Stack Overflow tabs later; BAM! I discovered Supabase! It lets you store data globally and even offers generous free storage. But of course... I had zero experience integrating a database with frontend.
Still I told myself "we've got a week and a half before 31st October! Why not learn something new?"
My Learnings in the Process
While setting up the database with the frontend I learned a few cool things:
Row Level Security (RLS)
Access control that defines who can read, insert, update, or delete specific rows based on policies.Migration Files
Version controlled SQL scripts that track and apply database schema changes over time, allowing teams to sync database structures across environments.CRUD Operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
The four fundamental database operations: Create adds new data, Read retrieves it, Update modifies it, and Delete removes it.Uploading files to cloud
Cloud file storage service that uploads files to remote servers and returns public URLs, allowing applications to store and retrieve uploaded content without managing server infrastructure.Organizing files
Containers that group and organize related files in cloud storage.Public vs Private buckets
Access control for file storage; public buckets allow anyone with the URL to download files while private buckets require authentication.
Check out the Torctoberfest Repo here: https://github.com/jasonetorres/torctoberfest
Building torcReads taught me far more than just coding. Before this, I thought backend and database were way out of my league. But once hit a real problem, I had no choice but to figure it out! Kudos to Pat Clark for reviewing and giving thoughtful feedback on each of my pull requests.
I realized open source isn't about being an expert in everything and you don't need to know all to get started. It's about showing up, trying things and learning in public. Even a small idea can turn into something valuable when you have a great community guiding you!
Happy Hacking! 🕸️👻
Top comments (1)
I am still in your old boat still hesitant