Introduction
We're six days into Hacktoberfest, and I'm quickly realizing that my goals are going to be a bit harder to reach than I initially envisioned.
Why?
I'm pretty new to open source. Not an expert, but I know about the workflow and how to do the simple stuff like make a PR.
So in theory, I'm technically capable of doing this. 100%.
The issue that I've been combating for the past week hasn't been technically challenging, it's been more of a mental struggle. I'm always hearing that open source needs more contributors, but looking around at repositories I find that every issue that is manageable is always being snapped up before I get to it.
Is this a problem on my end? Should I be quicker on the uptake when issues are posted? Am I not looking hard enough?
What I'm doing
My current Hacktoberfest finding schema looks something like this.
- Go to the Hacktoberfest projects site.
- Sort the projects by JavaScript, and find the ones that have between 0 and 50 stars.
- Sort by most recently updated.
And honestly, I've been getting a whole bunch of this.
I actually contributed to one, but it got shut down a few days ago because it turned out that repos like it were generating a ton of low quality contributions.
So what do I do? I'm being told that there's plenty of work, I'm not finding anything obvious to work on that fits with the values of the event.
What am I doing wrong?
So I've thought about it, and I've come to a conclusion.
Issues that are listed aren't the only things to fix.
This made sense. An issue on my end was that everything that was documented was being snatched up; everything that was on the table was being taken too fast.
What if I took something that wasn't on the table?
A new feature, a typo in the content, etc. Something that no one has noticed yet.
Tackling things like these would let me contribute 1) to something other than a list of stuff, and 2) with a guaranteed issue.
Going forward
I've got 26 days left (including today, because you can always do something valuable with the time in front of you). That's plenty of time to find contributions in the wild. Fingers crossed.
Anyone else have thoughts on contributing to the event? Where are you finding your repositories?
As always, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day!
Top comments (4)
Just to say that I would bet it's particularly competitive during Hacktoberfest to find a good beginner-friendly issue. I don't think it's always this hard, so keep that in mind.
And echoing Jake, good on ya for sticking with it and looking for a solution!
Admittedly, I don't know if all of these issues would be manageable for a beginner (kinda thinking not) but we've put together a public project board to house the different issues that are open for the community to work on. You might wanna take a look through those issues to see if any are a good fit for you!
Here's a post that we've written up which highlights the issues and provide other helpful info:
Announcing Our Hacktoberfest Issue Board!
Mai Irie for The DEV Team ・ Sep 26
Best of luck out there, I hope you can find some good-fitting issues to work on!
First, I'd like to say, "well done!" I'm seeing a lot of people getting frustrated, throwing up their hands, and quitting Hacktoberfest for the very reason you're asking about. So well done for continuing to try and find a solution!
In regard to this statement, would you mind sharing what a "manageable issue" would be for you?
Hi Jake! Thanks for the kind words.
For my personal definition, an issue is manageable if I feel that I'm technically inclined to get it right. If I know how to code the solution to an issue, I'll consider it to be up for grabs. The problem then lies with the fact that I'm not familiar with many of the more technical degrees of programming - hence my pursuit of low/no-code solutions.
Is it a problem with my skillset? Sure. I'm somewhat confident in the notion that as issues get harder to solve, the quantity of contributors willing to fix them gets smaller. The obvious solution would then be to improve my technical ability so that I can fit into that percentage that's able to fix the problems (or to latch on to a low/no-code problem, but the issue with that is that the bar is set so low that the same over-crowding occurs).
This all makes sense, and it sounds like you may be falling into a situation that many young developers fall into...the trap of waiting until you are sure you know what to do before diving in. So if I may make a few suggestions, I think we can certainly find you a few tickets to work on!
Push yourself. Find something a little outside your comfort zone. Something you aren't 100% sure you can solve. Without knowing more about your skills/experience I can't really provide any suggestions or examples here...but look for things you might know a little about, but would probably need to learn 1 or 2 things before you could solve it. What this will do is put you in a position to learn and grow. If you only stick to what you already know, things will move much more slowly for you.
Go find issues. Don't just look for existing tickets that someone else has found and reported. There is huge opportunity to go find new issues and solve them. A great place to start for this is in a project's documentation. Look for things that could be written more clearly or things that are missing altogether. Many projects lack sufficient documentation to even get the project up and running in a local environment...so there is LOTS of opportunity here!
And if you want to move beyond the docs, spin the project up and test it! Find a bug and see if you can fix it...if not, no worries. Reporting a bug is still contributing! You don't have to wait for tickets to be opened to contribute!
This month, many of the project boards promoting projects that are looking for contributors are going to have TONS of people crawling all over them, which is why you are seeing the tickets disappearing so fast. Instead, think of some of the projects you have used before, and check out their repos. You might get lucky and find some that aren't on the project board lists where it will be a little easier to find tickets you are comfortable working on. And if so, now you're getting to contribute to a project you actually use, which is a good feeling!
Just because someone else has a solution doesn't mean it's the best (or right) solution. So if there is a ticket that already has a PR, look it over, see what they did. Maybe you can do it better!
I hope at least some of these suggestions helps! Good luck, and Happy Hacking!