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Hacktoberfest - Ideas for Contributing as a Beginner

Manuel Castellin on October 01, 2020

First day into Hacktoberfest! Yay! And I'm already freaking out about it! šŸ¤Ŗ It was fun publicly committing to make four OpenSource contributions i...
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Lisa Sy (she/her)

Hey everyone! Lisa here, and I'm a product designer here at Forem. If you're working on projects off of our forem/forem repo, we wrote up some front-end resources for you as you navigate our design system: resources doc for front-end dev

Happy hacking! šŸŽ‰

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Manuel Castellin

Hi Lisa, thanks for your inputs in the discussion!

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Gary Bell

1. finding a project that picks your interest

This is the hardest part for me. I've been a developer for more years than I care to remember, but really struggle to find a project I am actually passionate about (except GitLab, but for obvious reasons it's not on GitHub, and therefore not part of Hacktober).

I think part of that comes from not using enough applications. Or the ones I do are in languages I've never worked with at any depth. Yes it's a great way to get introduced to new ways of working, but it always feels intimidating.

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Manuel Castellin

I hear that, Gary! It's been the same for me, but don't give up if you find an interesting project keep working the repo on every angle!
I think that it's better to be collecting meeting notes for a project you love rather than doing easy coding on a random project just for the sake of contributing!

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Gary Bell

My biggest issues is that I can (and do) use GitLab for everything that I would otherwise have separate systems for. It kinda limits my exposure to other systems somewhat.

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Manuel Castellin

Maybe it's not for this thread, but what is the biggest advantage of using GitLab over GitHub in your opinion? I always wanted to see if it's worth the hype they've built around it

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Gary Bell

tl;dr

The vast amount of features, all in one place. You don't need separate tools all over the place.

The (shortened) long answer

I've written a full blog post, the full long answer, about why I use GitLab. It essentially comes down to the fact that you get so many features for little or no cost. GitHub is becoming increasingly more competitive, but I made the move back when you couldn't have free private repositories and $7 a month only got you 4 private repositories.

But having somewhere that has:

  • Source control
  • issues (plus customisable Kanban boards)
  • CI/CD
  • Wiki all out of the box is a big driver. It introduces certain features at a minimal price-point for private repositories. And for open source projects gives all features to that repo/project for free.

Oh, and you can host it yourself for no extra cost.

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Manuel Castellin

It's a very interesting perspective! Nice article by the way, very detailed oriented with the feature comparison!

To be honest, I tried GitLab with just one private repo for fun, but when you put it in the perspective of using it for teams I can see the value of having the whole package in one place. It's a pain using Github for code, then Jenkins, then Jira, then move to the AWS console, and so on..

Thanks a lot for sharing the article!

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Gary Bell

Thanks. I need to look at Github again to compare GitLab CI and Github actions

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perpetual . education • Edited

These are great ideas! You could also learn Go. It's pretty fun!

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Manuel Castellin

@perpetual_education I canā€™t argue with that logic šŸ˜…

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Brayden W āš”ļø

Thanks for the ideas! This is my first time participating in Hacktoberfest and really needed some help with ways to contribute. This article made my day :D

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Manuel Castellin

Same here Brayden!
Iā€™m glad it helped! Best of luck with your contributions šŸ¤ž

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Rohit Jadhav • Edited

Completed the Hacktober fest I and I fell it's a great initiative
Completed

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Manuel Castellin

Cool! Great work Rohit! I'm on my 3rd PR today looking forward to completing the challenge!
What swag are you going to choose? T šŸ‘• or tree? šŸŒ²

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Rohit Jadhav

T šŸ‘•
As a beginner, I guess it will boost me up

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Manuel Castellin

How was your first day into Hacktoberfest? You can share your experience here in the comments!