I'm excited to be getting up to speed with Hacktoberfest and testing out my git fitness and sharpening some tools.
I thought a great place to start contributing to projects from the greater open source community would be to look for an easy issue posted on by a larger scale project. I wanted to be able to observe how bigger projects approach and manage requesting and managing external contributions. My expectation being that well-established projects would provide great insight into best practices for protocols and workflows for open source dev.
I was able to find a small doc fix issue on the NodeJS repo that allowed me to interact with this major project, stepping through the contribution process without excess pressure or concern.
The doc edits themselves were not much to toot my horn about. Nonetheless, I found the issue soon after it was created, thanks to the “good first issue” label filter in GitHub's issue search. As requested, I updated a small anchor formatting error in a specific section of release contribution guidelines documentation (pretty appropriate considering what I’m learning at the moment).
I was able to navigate through the projects readme's associated with contribution and make sure to use their defined processes and commit message style guide. Finally I was able to make changes, push, commit changes and create a Pull Request quickly and according to their guidelines. The PR was tested, approved by a number of node team members and merged to the main release within a matter of hours. Great success!
I was able to see how this large project has setup testing and approvals on external user Pull Requests. Since this was strictly docs update they didn't require local testing but I did get some insight into how node expects code contributions and fixes to be tested prior to PR.
This whole process was extremely enlightening as to how a project can optimize, streamline and secure the contribution process.
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