Week1: Hi there Hacktober!

What is Hacktober and why I want to participate it?

For those people like me who have never heard of and never attended Hacktober but still are in love with GitHub, Hacktober is definitely the event worth a try since Hacktober encourages participators who wish to make contributions to the open-source community by providing some prizes. For me, I always wanted to make some payback to the open-source community since I've used many open-source frameworks, many of which have made my life way easier, however, I have never made any contribution to this community. I wish to make some contribution but don't know how to get involved. Luckily, I got a chance to enroll in DPS909 which is an open source-related pro-option class in my BSD program. During this class, I got a chance to hear of Hacktober and realized this could be a fantastic kick starter for me to get into the open-source community since Hacktober is going to provide me with a list of ice-breaking repositories for me to get my feet wet. Also, what's more interesting is that they give a t-shirt souvenir for those participants who have made and have been accepted for merge on 4 Pull Requests. I want to win that trophy so that I can wear the T-shirt on my job interviews. So Hacktober, here I am.

Make it simple on the first issue.

Since this is my first time contributing to GitHub, there are many rules and procedures that I need to be aware of. To give myself some time to learn the basics, I chose a programming book-sharing repository as the first one that I'm going to make Pull Request on. I started it off by reading the rules about issue-creating, pull-request-creating, and the basic format that I need to follow while adding new content. It may sound pretty easy, but my first Pull Request was rejected by the maintainer because the content I added was not an actual book, but it was a GitHub repository that shares source code analysis for Android, initially I was a little bit frustrated, but soon after I messaged the maintainer I realized that it is permissible to upload a Gitbook that is generated with the content in the repository. However, since neither the repository I wanted to share has generated a Gitbook nor I had another good book to share, I had to look for another way to make contributions. Soon after some poking around in this repository, I realized that the language I wanted to share books in(which is simplified Chinese) was updated 12 days ago, this could mean that there might be some URLs that are not accessible anymore. After having accessed these URLs one by one, I soon noticed and removed some invalid URLs and made a new Pull Request and issue, luckily this time my Pull Request was admitted for merging. From this first-time experience, I learned that, as long as you're following the rules, you will always be welcome to join this community, and also, my first communication with the project maintainer went pretty well, as opposed to what I thought it would be.

What should I improve?

Always read the rules for the repository that you want to participate in before starting to work on it, if possible, open an issue to ask if the content you want to add/modify is permitted or not, otherwise, both the time of maintainer and yours will be wasted.