What I Learned From Hacktoberfest
Let me be honest here. Everyone of us had that moment in life when we were stupefied by people actually contributing to massive projects. Hacktoberfest helped me to break out of my bubble and become one of those people! Read along if you too want to become one of those people.
Here are the 🌠 5️⃣ magical steps🌠:
- When you visit the project page, you are presented with the README. The name tells you what you have to do to get a decent idea of the repository. 📖
- Often, you will find links to important documents you need to go through in the README itself. Don't forget to go through these: 📚
- Code of conduct - how you are supposed to behave in the community
- Contributing - how you can help improve the project
- License - permissions to use or own the software
- Now, you should start reading the code. If you feel that something isn't quite right, open an Issue about it! Instead, if you feel you can fix it, you can even open a Pull Request with your changes! 👨💻
- For huge codebases, it is not possible to read the entire code and keep your sanity intact at the same time. So, you should try looking into Issues created by other people. Do ask them for clarifications if needed. If you understand what they mean, try to query the codebase with relevant keywords using
git grepor GitHub's Search facility so that you can find out the code that needs your contribution. 👀 - Try to do your best at adding the changes. You don't have to be perfect. When you are happy, open a Pull Request! There is a team of people who will review your changes. If something needs to be changed, they will inform you kindly. At the end, if everything works out well, your Pull Request will be merged and you will become a contributor! 🎉
This feels like a lot of work? Well, that's what Hacktoberfest is here for! The tee serves as a great motivation to drive you through 4 passes of the 5 magical steps. In fact, if you honestly liked the experience, Hacktoberfest will turn you into a Pull Request beast who will get to produce a yearlong of Pull Requests! Happy Open Sourcing! 😃
Top comments (1)
Great!