The first contribution can be the hardest.
For me, it was difficult finding projects where I could contribute code.
Instead, one of my first Hacktoberfest contributions in 2017 was translating text in a student project from German to English.
What was your first Hacktoberfest contribution?
My first open-source PR wasn't during Hacktoberfest, but I want to bring it up because I think its a good story on contributing to open-source.
I opened my first PR due to running into a problem I found in my own project. I googled the error I had and found an issue on github for it. What's interesting is the problem and solution was already laid out. So much so the only work that had to be done was go through the github flog to get the fix into the library.
Like most newbies to open source this seemed really complicated, and required working with actual developers which terrified me! I was still really new (I even mentioned that in my PR) to web development and open source, but I read the guide, and did what I could to get the fix going.
My PR was merged, and I (along with anyone else who ran into the issue) got their fix within a day or so.
What I found was everyone involved was extremely helpful! I had no reason to be scared, literally the worse thing that could happen is my PR get's rejected and everyone moves on. No one is going to get mad for people trying to help out, no one is going to get angry, and no you wont break anything, as people review what you've done, along with potentially automated tests protecting against any regression.
There is so much to gain by opening PR's and contributing to open-source, not only for the community, but also for yourself in terms of experience!
If you know you know some stuff, even basic JavaScript, or another language you can contribute. Even if you know nothing you can contribute to documentation. If you ever wanted to work on code that isn't what you wrote, open-source provides a huge playground for that, to learn from others, and contribute back.
Hacktoberfest might give you some incentive, but the incentive is always there, just gotta leverage it.
Happy hacktoberfest, open them PRs!
I think contributing to the documentation is at least as useful as contributing fixes, new features... and yes, no need to worry, I merged for instance almost every PR I got (with two PRs we need to figure out what's wrong, but we'll get it work... Maven stuff ;)). Fixing spelling errors or grammar errors is also a great start :-) every PR counts
My first was last year finally had the courage to do it lol.
I say this from experience, contribute to repos you actively use, preferably small repos in a beginning. The big ones usually are extremely hard for beginners to get noticed. Also big code bases it takes a while to find your way around it.
It was for nestjs.
For my first ever Hacktober Fest contribution I added a new color scheme to the Gotop project.
My first PR was about deleting some code:
github.com/pawelczak/EasyAutocompl...
and add more code