Intro
Hey everyone, this is the proper Hacktoberfest I have participated in (and this is also my first post on dev.to so hello everyone!). I had heard about open-source a lot and wanted to give it a try but always needed motivation. When Hacktoberfest was announced, I realized this was the time to get out of my comfort zone and work on it.
Highs and Lows
I first began searching for repos with the tag hacktoberfest and boy, there were plenty! It was hard to decide what would be a good one for a beginner in open-source like me. Eventually, I found my first repo to work on. It was about Meteor, a tool to rapidly design your prototype and develop your application. I suggested a user-friendly change that helped those reading documents to avoid opening new links just to read one line and hence, save a few clicks. When this PR was merged, I was happy to know I was one step closer to the goal! This motivated me further to try out other repos.
Thanks to Hacktoberfest, I got an opportunity to contribute to the HuggingFace repo by completing docstrings for a few transformers models. I used Codespace to ensure I was able to follow their instructions with fewer to no errors owing to the system. Consequently, I learned more about Makefiles and understanding warnings which helped me in my growth as a programmer.
Contributing to Python repo of The Algorithms made me realize that where I was making mistakes. Before Hacktoberfest, I used to avoid creating branches and directly contribute to the main branch. But, after a mistake where a PR was gonna change multiple files than needed, the maintainers advised me to always work on branches to avoid merges from the main branch affecting the PR. I had to fork the repo again to ensure my work wouldn't affect other files and this time my PR got merged without any ill side effects. I was happy to work on this repo twice and to feel more accomplished!
Growth
Overall, helping out open-source projects really helped me grow as a programmer. It helped me stay out of my comfort zone and try new tools with lots of trial and error. I got to discover new repos with so many learning resources available to new developers. I am now more than motivated to contribute to new and growing projects than ever! Highly encourage everyone to participate in Hacktoberfest next year, especially for networking, learning new tools, rewards, and badges to keep growing. Keep coding :)
GitHub: https://github.com/AksharGoyal
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