For my first Hacktoberfest contribution, I worked on Issue #3 in the NIRMAAN repository. The issue was about creating a proper README for the project, since the repository initially didn’t have one.
Since this is my first time participating in Hacktoberfest, I decided to look for issues labeled “good first issue” so I could familiarize myself with open source contributions without feeling overwhelmed. I wanted something manageable but still meaningful, and the README issue seemed like a good fit.
I spent a lot of time searching for a good repo I could work on. Many projects I found either didn’t have enough issues, or all of the visible issues were already assigned. Some had issues whose titles were a single word with no description and from what I undestand they didn’t really want outside contributors and were just tracking things internally. Other projects I was interested in, were written in languages I’ve never used before. Altogether, this ruled out a lot of projects I genuinely wanted to work on. In the end I decided to keep it low-key for my first contribution and pick up an issue not based on the repo but rather on the issue itself. I did that because I need to make contributions to three different repositories anyway, so I’ll continue searching and hope to find a nice project to get involved with next week.
To get started, I basically followed the usual steps I’d take when contributing to someone else’s project. I forked the NIRMAAN repo to my own GitHub account, then created a new branch locally for the issue. I cloned my fork to my computer, went through the project structure, and then created the README file. After finishing the changes, I committed them, pushed the branch to my fork, and finally submitted a Pull Request from my branch to the original repository. This is a pretty basic scenario of actions, as we’ve done this several times in previous labs.
Even though NIRMAAN isn’t super big, I still spent some time reviewing it before taking on the task. I didn’t want to claim the issue only to realize later that the project was too complicated or that I didn’t fully understand how it worked, which could have made my documentation inaccurate. Going through the repo beforehand helped me feel more confident. Despite that, creating the README was a nice task, as it allowed me to practice my Markdown skills and organize the project documentation clearly.
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