Intro
I have successfully completed this year's 4 pull requests to contribute towards the open-source code and community and engage in Hacktoberfest of this year. Just like last year it was a very good experience and was even easier after already being familiar with the rules and workflow from last year.
I enjoy getting to contribute to some cool open-source projects and helping them grow, as well as improving my skills and learning something new in the process.
Contributions
This year I focused more on projects' maintenance rather than building new features or fixing bugs like I did last year. I realized many projects lack the required maintenance due to the fact that it's often overlooked by other hacktoberfest participants as dull or insignificant. In other words, I decided to do some "dirty work".
On two repositories I contributed by migrating their package, library and dependency versions to the newest versions. This had not been done for a long time due to the fact that the upgrades introduces many breaking changes which required time and effort to be fixed and adjusted. I did just that, and I think it is important to keep all dependency versions up to date often not just because of new updates but also because of security concerns.
In my opinion my best contribution was to
I contributed by updating and refactoring a large chunk of code in a file which had numerous code smell reports from SonarQube. I successfully managed to fix the code smells and refactor the code such that it was more readable, manageable and did not contain any code smells.
Conclusion
My experience this year was again very thrilling and I'm excited to be a part of an amazing open-source initiative. I encourage anybody who is having self-doubt or second thoughts about contributing to open source to step out of the shadow and make their first step towards open-source. It is intimidating at the start but it's very much worth the effort. It is important that we have this kind of initiatives that remind us how great open-source can be and keep us motivated to support many more open-source projects.
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