Background
I'm brand spanking new to open source. Before hacktoberfest open source projects were a scary unknown and to a certain extent they still are to me. Thanks to Virtual Coffee and Digital Ocean I was able to make my first two pull requests on GitHub and participate in my first hacktober.
Reflections
I only made two qualifying pull requests for this hacktoberfest but I'm incredibly happy with that. I started off really wanting to get the t-shirt for being 1 of 50,000 completing the required 4 accepted requests. Because of this, I rushed into it trying my hardest to find things I could do quickly. A lot of the easier requests that I could handle were taken and a couple that I tried were not really contributing to anything other than padding your completed count.
It took a few weeks but I came to terms with the fact that I was participating with the wrong intentions. There's nothing wrong with wanting the shirt but the main goal is to spread more awareness to open source and the many projects you can make contributions to. Being to make a difference by contributing to open source projects and learning are more important to me than trying to validate myself as a real developer by getting a shirt.
I didn't get the shirt and I didn't get 4 pull requests, but I did make my first pull requests on GitHub and I've gotten more familiar with GitHub and the many open source projects out there that I hope to contribute to one day.
Top comments (1)
It’s not always about the swag. More about what you’ve learned and bettered your skills. Congrats on crushing your PRs though 👏
This is my first Hacktoberfest and it’s opened my eyes to the vast open source world out there. Happy Coding out there! 👍