Hacktoberfest As A Beginner

What Is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a global event ran by DigitalOcean that takes place during the month of October to celebrate open source software. The goal is to submit 4 pull requests (PRs) to public GitHub repositories. Doing so will net you a free t-shirt or a planted tree. Here’s their website for more details: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Code Newbie Looking To Contribute

If you’re a code newbie looking to contribute during Hacktoberfest then you may have a hard time. Hacktoberfest is very popular so finding a repository that’s only looking for CSS or basic JavaScript changes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Some people have spent more than an hour looking and didn’t find anything suitable.

However, some devs are uploading beginner friendly projects to help beginners learn about the Git process. Git version-control is widely used in professional development so you will probably need to learn it at some point.

Code Newbie Looking To Receive Contributions

That was the bad news. Here’s the good news. If you’re a code newbie looking for help with a project, Hacktoberfest is a treasure trove full of coding solutions. And you don’t even need to go looking for them, they come to you. This gold mine will make up for all the times you asked a coding question online and it went ignored. Or worse, got marked as a duplicate because someone else asked a similar question 7 years ago, even though that code doesn’t work any more. Yes I’m looking at you StackOverflow.com.

Anyway, remember your old projects? Did you have any issues with them? Did you want to add features but weren’t capable, didn’t have the time or just couldn’t be bothered? Hacktoberfest will remedy all of that. Just upload your project to GitHub.com, tag it with the “hacktoberfest” topic, create “issues” for everything you want fixed and watch the solutions come rolling in.

I uploaded a project with 3 issues to help a Twitter friend get some PRs. I ended up receiving 7 PRs within 2 days.

My Project

The project I uploaded was an option picker. It modified a basic to-do list to randomly pick one of the options for you (for those times when you have so much to do you just don’t know where to start).

Here are a couple of the issues my project had:

1. Sometimes the final highlight would not remain visible, meaning the user would not be able to see the option that the option picker has selected
   

   Fig.1 - Screenshot showing an option selected

2. The border between entries would get thicker if an item was marked as completed and then deleted
   

   Fig.2 - Screenshot showing border width error

These problems are now fixed and the random pull requests I received were fixing problems I didn’t even know I had. Such as being able to press enter to add an entry to the list instead of clicking the "Add option" button. Or disabling the button if the user has not added any entries to the list.

Conclusion

I highly recommend putting an old project out there if you want it to be improved. Even if you don’t, consider putting one up anyway as it will help other code newbies gain experience using Git and contributing towards projects. And if you’re new to Git yourself, it will give you some practice too.