Around mid-October, my friend introduced Hacktoberfest 2020 to me. It looked so interesting that I decided to sign up even though I had no experience with contributing to open-source.
Background
I'm going to talk a little about myself. I'm new to the coding scene and started my journey with a bootcamp and now I'm working as a junior software engineer. During this time, whenever there were discussions about contributing to open source, it sounds so distant because I feel like I don't really have anything to contribute with my current skill level.
Process
Nonetheless, the event and reward for participation drew me in. Onboarding was simple, all I had to do was link my Github account to the event. They even had a short video walkthrough to guide newbies like me. Some important takeaways were how to look for projects that were open-source and contribution guidelines. To find projects, here's a list of online tools that I found very helpful:
Contributions
The video walkthrough also held my hands through making a first PR with an open-source project, DigitalOcean Community's haiku collection. It helped me to understand the most non-disruptive way of contributing:
- look through the issues tab to find suitable problems to tackle
- fork the repo
- clone it to local
- make changes
- push changes up to forked repo
- submit a pull request
The next repo I worked on was to write a readme for cipher diaries explaining how the rail fence cipher works.
After that, I found another project that collects solutions for algorithms. I helped code out an implementation for rail fence cipher which I learned while writing the readme for the previous project. How convenient!
A more impactful project that I took on was to help a certificate generator with front-end code. I managed to refactor their view files by making partials for pages to reduce repetition. This way, the .ejs view files can be kept short without having to write a full HTML document for every page created. This was fulfilling because it added scalability to the project.
Reflections
Having tried out various ways of contributing, I feel that solving a project's pain points returned the most sense of satisfaction. I'll be looking forward to Hacktoberfest 2021. In the meantime, I'll definitely be looking at the issues tab of the common open-source libraries to find ways that I can contribute.
Top comments (1)
Great read!