Diving into Open Source, Final Part and Recap

As we are near to the end of the Hacktoberfest ,this is my final Pull Request, In this blog i will mention about what had happened in this month and also my last issue and what i did to fix it !

Objectives and Changes Made

As requested from the author/moderator my task was to remove a section from homepage of their website which consist of their executive members of their college group which include current year and previous year.

Link for issue: Issue
Link for PR: PR

Their task was labelled as:

Remove the option to view 2023/24 from the home page
Remove the 2024/2025 as well but make sure to display the members of 2024/2025

So i started with finding out how the data is called in to the main home page and the files which handles the data of the members of the group, so i found out that there is 3 main files.

_data : which has the data of the executive members of their group, for this requirement i don't want to change anything from this.
executive-members.html : which has the html code, which makes the cards for their members by calling in the data from the previously mentioned file.

An example screenshot of the card :

about.markdown : In this file which has the markdown code for rendering the about page, this just act as a page which will eventually call the members list, so that the members list is visible to anyone vesting about page.

What i added was mainly a new file called executive-members-list.html, which will hold all the members data from all the years they required. I believe with this addition they can easily control or edit the members list rather than manually changing it in all the places it requires.

Next the requirement was to remove the indications of the years from the home screen which was actually controlled by executive-members.html, I removed all the button components and year list to easily fix the issue.

Before screenshot:

After screenshot:

Finally the about page update, now they will be able to see all the members list over there i.e 2024,2023.

As of now i have send in the pull request for the issue. They have not responded. I will update this when i get any response from them.

I got an update 29-10-2024, they were happy with my change and approved my PR without any further changes!

Recap

As Hacktoberfest, is coming to end which also marks the end of Release 0.2, It was a fun month of participating in Open Source contributing into Repo, engaging with other members of open source community. Some of the main difficulty that i faced was, sometimes the authors take too long to respond which will affect the ability to proceed further as time is not on our side.

First PR PR PR 1

Let's start with my first

As this was my first PR, not much clue what to expect from the community i had started this, this was a simple work, i was browsing through the page with the Repo participating in this issue. So decided to add a bit for my first PR. This was just a simple jump_search algorithm in Python.

As of now this PR is not merged as the author is not available to communicate, he has requested some changes which i have updated no, response still so still waiting on it.

Second PR PR 2

Now, this one is the one i enjoyed the most among everything, i came across a Engineering college in Nepal which has their website for IT club up in GitHub, they are called Computer Club Dhapakhel,Lalitpur, they had cool active members and discord servers.

My issue was with them to add a blog post for their website based on the figma design they had already in place, i did a pull request with their requirement but i was requested have some changes, with layout, sizing and coloring scheme. Honestly i was a bit scared will i even get accepted for a merge, eventually after back and forth reviewing with the authors i work was finally accepted and merged in with their main code.

Third PR PR 3

My third PR was also with the same IT club which i mentioned above this time it was about adding a new feature to their events page, which was adding a function that the users will be able to download .ics files to mark the events in their calendar. I was successfully to create and implement the feature for them, It is still in the reviewing stage. As the owners or not in the same time zone and they are also students they are limitation for them to review the code.

Final PR PR 4

For my final PR which was also with them, i improved their user experience, which was requested by one of the authors of their Repo, which is basically mentioned above of this blog post

Conclusion

I have learned a lot of new things about language, GitHub, and especially how to participate and behave in the open source community. Some of the things that worry me the most are when the people who work with you also directly impact your progress in open source. Like, we need to wait for them to review, merge, etc., which sometimes can be frustrating, but I think it is normal to have it like that!

All I can say is that this is not easy; time and patience are also key things to have when we are working with open source. That is the main takeaway for me as I finished my PR's.

Link for their website deployment (Please note this may not have all of the changes i made, 2 of my issues are still under review !):
https://computerclubkec.github.io/