I finally completed my first Hacktoberfest!!! 🎃🎃🎃 To recap, here are the issues and PRs that I worked on over the past four weeks:
Week 1:
Issue, Pull Request, Blog Post
Summary:
During the first week, I was feeling really overwhelmed with trying to find an issue to work on. I decided to tackle something I was relatively confident about working on, which was UI, and I fixed a UI bug in the Telescope project. Although it was a small styling fix involving just a few lines of code, I learned the basics of working on an issue, creating a pull request, and getting my code merged into the main repository.
Week 2:
Issue, Pull Request, Blog Post
Summary:
I worked on creating updated issue forms for the Openverse Catalog repository, by converting their existing issue templates from markdown to YAML. I learned about issue forms, YAML syntax, and for this pull request, I received a lot of feedback on my changes, which I fixed before my pull request was successfully merged.
Week 3:
Issue, Pull Request, Blog Post
Summary:
This week, I was really interested in working on a bigger repository and I like React so Microsoft's Fluent UI repository seemed like a good choice. However, after working on the issue, I didn't receive any reviews on my pull request. I think that maybe this was because the issue was created by someone that wasn't a regular contributor to the repository and perhaps this change wasn't required. Therefore, even if a repository has the "Hacktoberfest" label, I think it's important to check if the code maintainers are active in an issue before working on it.
Week 4:
Issue 1, Pull Request 1, Issue 2, Pull Request 2, Blog Post
Summary:
Since my third pull request did not get reviewed, I decided to work on two issues in my last week. Because Hacktoberfest was coming to an end, I really wanted to challenge myself to try something new and out of my comfort zone. I worked on form validation in Angular and added a feature to a game in Python. I was honestly so surprised to find out how much I could accomplish using a completely new language (Python). The scope of these two issues was definitely much bigger than the issues I've worked on previously and I think it was a great way to end off an eventful month.
Conclusion
Overall, I learned a lot and also made some mistakes along the way:
I always avoided issues that had comments because I thought that this meant someone else was already working on them. However, I think these issues are still worth taking a look at. Sometimes, it's just the code maintainers providing input on the issue.
I wanted to work on some larger projects at first because it seemed they had more activity and more issues, but I realized that smaller repositories are also a great way to find issues. You can work on larger issues (because there are fewer contributors) or issues that are more beginner friendly (if it's a repository that's just getting started for example).
Last but not least, it may seem daunting to take on an issue in something you've never worked with before (such as a new language) but I think this event is a perfect opportunity try something new and you will be surprised by what you can get done.
I'm so grateful that my open source development course and professor introduced me to this event and it was such a great experience to both learn and improve as a developer and contribute to the open source community!
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