My Hacktoberfest Story

#hacktoberfest

How did I come to know about Hacktoberfest 2020?

I used to hear a lot about the opensource community, but I was always afraid to contribute to this community. Once I tried to contribute, but my PR was immediately closed, and I never tried again. Fast forward to 29th September 2020 when my colleague told me about Hacktoberfest 2020. I said I'll see if I'll be able to make four contributions in a month (where I couldn't even manage to make a single contribution before).

How did I make my first opensource contribution?

I didn't specifically target this Hacktoberfest for my first opensource contribution. We were using a Python library Flask-Mobility in our application, and our application is currently running on Python 3.5, and we are planning to migrate it to Python 3.8 soon. But this library didn't have support for Python 3.8.

We had a team discussion about it, and we decided that first, we would clone this library and try to run the tests in Python 3.8. If all the tests pass, we'll let the author know that you can add support for Python 3.8. So I cloned the library and ran the tests in Python 3.8, and all the tests passed.

Then I thought to myself, that this is an excellent opportunity for me to make my first opensource contribution. So I made the changes myself and opened a PR: Add support for Python 3.8. I was nervous that it might end up being closed (as it happened in the past), but to my surprise, it was accepted and merged within a day.

After experiencing how easy it was to make an opensource contribution, I started making more contributions. And within a couple of days, I had completed my target of four PRs.