My Hacktoberfest 20 Journey Towards Climate Change

#hacktoberfest #beginners #haskell

What I Learned From Hacktoberfest 2020

I knew nothing about Hacktoberfest before and came across it by chance. I had never contributed to open source previously as I felt it required one to be an expert in some programming language. I wanted to shed my inhibitions and preconceived notions and thus felt that this time was a great opportunity to get started with open source. The T-shirt and the swag was my initial motive to make 4 PR's as I felt it would give me a lot of happiness and motivation to become a confident developer.

Pre-Hacktoberfest

I started researching about projects I could contribute to a few days ahead of hacktoberfest and faced difficulty in identifying good/small issues I could contribute to. Over time, I watched many web streams and blog posts about hacktoberfest and getting into open source as a beginner and eventually I was able to pick up some easy issues that I could make a PR for.

My Journey Of Creating PR's

As I started creating PR's, I learnt small things like,

keeping my fork updated with the latest updates on my upstream parent repo
making use of CI/CD in a project
making proper comments on PR's

I thought I would never be able to contribute to some repos maintained by companies, but I was so wrong. I made a small PR to jenkins-infra which was related to documentation.

Later, I found repos like kowainik/learn4haskell where we can create 4 valid PR's and learn some Haskell along the way. As of now, I have raised 2 PR's to this repo and I must say learning Haskell and functional programming concepts has been fun.

I was disappointed during the first few days when lots of people were commenting about hacktoberfest 2020 becoming shitoberfest and I doubted if I was doing the right thing with my PR's. I understood later that my PR's though not very great were fine and not spam PR's. I was not surprised when I came to know that most of the spam PR's were from India. To know why I was not surprised read - this. The hacktoberfest maintainers did a great job in handling these spammy PR's by extending the review period to 14 days and adding more regulations.

What I learnt

Making 4 valid PR's is a piece of cake. You just need to identify repos and issues that you can contribute to as a beginner.
Contributions need not be just code, they can be documentation work etc also.
Most project maintainers are very much interested to help beginners get into open source, so you just have to get started. Just have a look at one of my PR.
Once you make a few PR's and they get merged, you get an adrenaline rush to contribute more to open source.
Every pro was once a beginner himself, so don't worry about your PR's being not so great. Don't be self-critical. Follow the contribution guidelines for a particular repository and just get started.

Final Thoughts

Today I got a mail that my hacktoberfest challenge is complete. I felt very elated and all I could think of was my first hacktoberfest T-shirt. However, I gave up on getting the T-shirt and swag as I felt opting to plant a tree 🌳 in the hactoberfest forest would make a very tiny difference to the global environmental issues we face today. It was a difficult decision to make, but I am satisfied with that. I encourage you, my dear reader, to also opt to plant a tree instead of the T-shirt and swags. Let's contribute our bit in making this planet great again.