I am very happy to continue sharing my open-source journey through this second update of Hacktoberfest. In my previous blog, I discussed how I began contributing to Cloudinary's open-source projects, the process of setting up monorepos, and how I made my first two pull requests. This time, I want to talk about what happened next — the waiting period, the reviews, the feedback, and the new challenges that came my way.
Like many open-source contributors experience, getting pull requests reviewed can sometimes take a while. Maintainers often receive hundreds of submissions during Hacktoberfest, so patience becomes an essential part of the process.
The first issue I had worked on was #237, and you can view my pull request here: PR #238. The change I made was quite simple — just three lines of code — along with the addition of proper test cases to ensure functionality. You can read the full explanation of the change in the PR discussion. Despite the simplicity, the reviewer appreciated the clarity and attention to testing. That feedback made me realize something important: a “feature” doesn’t always mean a large addition of code. Sometimes, even a few well-written lines can enhance the functionality and stability of a project significantly. This experience taught me that quality and understanding are more valuable than quantity when contributing to open-source.
The next issue I had worked on was #233, which was a small bug related to escaping special characters in overlay text transformations. I had already explained the fix for this bug in my previous blog, but I later received a review confirming that the fix worked perfectly in end-to-end testing. Since I had already added a unit test for it, there were no further changes needed. You can read the review comment here. Shortly after, both my pull requests were merged, and the maintainer mentioned me to the all-contributors bot, officially adding my name to the contributors list of the repository. This was one of the most exciting moments for me because it made my contribution visible to everyone. On top of that, I also received an invitation link for the Cloudinary Hacktoberfest swag pack — a small but meaningful token of appreciation from the team. It reminded me that in open-source, patience and effort are always rewarded.
After those successful contributions, I decided to take on another issue from the same repository — #232. This one was quite different and more complex compared to the previous ones. The bug was about users being unable to use image transformations on images larger than 25 megapixels. I tried fixing this issue through PR #241, but it turned out that the changes I made were affecting other image transformation plugins in the library. The reviewer suggested rethinking the approach to make sure the fix worked consistently across all transformation modules. I am still exploring a better and cleaner solution for this bug. It is definitely a challenging one, but it has also been a great learning experience in understanding how multiple components interact within a complex codebase.
Looking back, this phase of Hacktoberfest has been extremely rewarding — not just because of the merged pull requests, but because of what I learned along the way. I learned that even small changes can have a big impact if done right. I understood that communication and patience are just as important as technical skills. Most importantly, I realized that open-source development is about teamwork, consistency, and the willingness to improve, not just about quick results.
I am still working on the last bug mentioned above and am quite excited to see how it evolves. Regardless of how it turns out, I know I will come out of it having learned something valuable. Once again, I am thankful to the Cloudinary team for their guidance and support, and to the Hacktoberfest community for giving me the opportunity to be part of something truly collaborative and meaningful.
Thank you for following my blog series, and I look forward to sharing more updates soon!
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