My first hacktoberfest: first time contributing to open-source

My first hacktoberfest: first time contributing to open-source

My story of contributions and open-source goes back to August and not October. My first year of college ended that month and I was very happy because I got almost 2 weeks doing nothing, watching Netflix, and enjoying homemade food. One of my friends, Anshum Shukla showed me a post on LinkedIn of a guy named Kunal Kushwaha, and I was pretty ignorant about it, because who's gonna watch some LinkedIn post just before vacation, but was forced to do so. That one post changed the way I was looking at my future, I explored the immense possibilities opened by open-source contributions, learning in public, and projects.

After going through a lot of search results, YouTube videos, and reading multiple blogs, I somewhat knew what is the importance of open-source. It possibly seems dreadful and daunting to read and search multiple lines of code but it is not what it seems. It is very easy to start if you have the right guidance and a welcoming community, both of it was provided with twitter.

So I started working on my skills and parallelly started Web Development. One day I came across a tweet by Eddie Jaoude on Hacktoberfest, and again my fingers ran through the keyboard searching for what it meant.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Spoiler: It is not related to Hacking or something like that.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event that celebrates open-source contributions from 1st October to 31st October. It is presented by DigitalOcean with support from AppWrite and Docker. During this month you're encouraged to contribute to your favorite repositories marked with the label Hacktoberfest. On successfully making four pull requests merged you get swags that include a very cool T-shirt from the Hacktoberfest team, but my objective was never to get a T-shirt.

My First Pull Request

So I was actively participating and joining some VCs in a discord community named SuperContributors and from there I saw a project which was basically an HTML cheatsheet to help people in HTML. I added a section that tells about the text formatting that can be done using HTML tags.

Open-Source With Pradumna Saraf

Just three-four days before the Hacktoberfest started, I saw this repository and saw one issue which I thought was solvable and asked to get assigned (also came to know that it is a good practice to ask the maintainer to assign you the issue before start working on it). Solved it and learned how to use GitHub pages, as my issue worked around it.

This repo is just so awesome for learning new things, if you're a beginner just like me, go on to this page and learn various things which are necessary for getting used to open-source contributions.

1 2 3 4.. I'm on the roll

On October 12, my four PRs got merged and were through the 7 days verification period. I was more than happy but didn't stop learning about new things, getting better 4 PRs weren't the end of the learning stage, it was merely the beginning of a very long and awesome journey.

My fifth PR was on an issue I raised after going through the page, the best part was maintainer was already going to raise it but I did it before him, it was like I already read his mind. Any guesses who was the owner/maintainer of the repository, none other than Pradumna Saraf.

SuperContributors

SuperContributors is a community, which deserves a special place in this blog. It is a totally beginner-friendly community, which helps people like me to learn various tech-related stuff. Amazing folks like Aayush Sharma, Bhavya Sachdeva, Chirag Varshney, Jaideep Solania, Kanika Gola, and many other faces are always eager to help beginners and let them grow.

My first meet-up

meetup.jpg

As October wasn't already good enough my application for the first meet-up got accepted. The day was 16 October, I have to go to HUDA city center, Gurugram, and got the amazing company of my friend Anshum Shukla. The meetup was organized by Solana and hosted by Hack This Fall.

So the meet-up was really nice and I had a total fanboy feeling inside me. Seeing so amazing folks in person, meeting them, and asking whatever doubts I had. It was mesmerizing to see such good people in one place.

The whole theme of the meet-up was around Hacktoberfest, there were sessions about git, GitHub, and open-source. What are good contributions, and what are bad contributions?

A talk by Aditya Oberoi and Haimantika about appwrite, which provides backend-as-a-service to developers.

In a talk by Prakarsh, he told about what Solana provides to developers. Solana is a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps for the world.

In a nutshell, the overall meet-up was probably the best day of this year.

Conclusion

Hacktoberfest isn't an event to complete 4 PRs or compete with who's gonna complete the target of 4 PRs. All I learned was code to contribute not to compete. Don't do open-source for the sake of a T-shirt. You might get a better one in a market or someplace. Open source is a pool of wisdom, you either can take a dip and learn from that or you can add your bucket of learning to it. Both will make you grow and be better.