Turning Frustration into Fascination: My Path to Open Source 💙</>

Yes, I won Hacktoberfest 2024 🤩
I’m a student of a sophomore student of Software Engineering and now loving the open-source world.
The saying "The more you hate, the more you love", It all started from this 😅.
I vividly remember, the last year in October there was an event for Hacktoberfest, some guest speakers were invited to give the intro to open-source to the students, and blah blah. As we were the juniors, we were forced to join the session, even if we didn’t want to take it, we had to. I was not able to understand even a single word, but one thing I got was that open-source is when we do some changes to someone’s else’ code to make it better, but I didn’t know how all of this is done.

We were just fed up with that session, but later I thought that this was worth it, there must be something special about it. The special thing was the t-shirt and swags that I discovered at that time 😁, which aren’t available this year sadly. But of course this is something more than that.

In October, starting open-source as a newbie was challenging for me. From only knowing how to upload a project to Github to how to create a Pull Request was an interesting journey. Initially, I was creating as many issues as possible I could and there wasn’t any response coming and not even a single issue was being assigned to me. This gave me a sense of patience that it’s absolutely normal to get a response even after a whole week. Then I started getting responses gradually. There came a time when I couldn’t even handle all the tasks and fix all the issues assigned to me.
Overall, This journey has been fascinating, and had many opportunities to connect and network with the open-source community; the only thing required is patience and consistency.
Sitting forcefully in the Hacktoberfest session to being part of the team conducting session now has been a very interesting journey 💙.