This is my first Hacktoberfest! I was able to work on two issues this week, one for Seneca's Telescope project and one for Wordpress Openverse Catalog. Finding the issues was a bit challenging since there are so many people and repos participating, but I remembered a piece of advice from my open source professor, which was to just get started rather than trying to find a perfect issue.
Telescope
Telescope is a tool for aggregating blog posts created at Seneca and it displays these blog posts on a website. For this issue, there was a problem with the CSS so that if an author's name was too long, there would be no margin between the author's name and the post date underneath. You can see an example of this issue below:
This was a great first issue for me to start off with. The problem was that the container for the author's name had a fixed height of 3rem so a very long author name would overflow the container. I removed the fixed height and adjusted the line height of the container for the date so that there would be a uniform margin between author name and date, regardless of author name length.
postDate: {
lineHeight: '1rem',
},
<div className={classes.postDate}>
You can see the result below:
Although the coding part was not too challenging, I learned a lot from following the Contributors documentation, as I tried to set up my environment to run both the front and back end of the project. A lot of the technologies required were things I had never worked with before, such as Redis and Elasticsearch. It was definitely challenging, but the documentation was very helpful and also visiting the Slack channel to see if any other people had similar issues was important as well. After I submitted my pull request, it was successfully merged into the repo! :)
Openverse Catalog (Work In Progress)
I have been using Wordpress quite a bit for another project so I was interested in getting involved. I looked through their repos and found an issue in the Openverse Catalog repo that I was interested in. The issue involved updating their issue templates from .md to .yml files and changing the syntax. The maintainers were extremely welcoming and responsive. Although my pull request is currently still a work in progress, I have been receiving a lot of feedback from the maintainers and continuing to improve my changes based on their comments.
Although this looked like a fairly straightforward issue at first, I have never with issue forms before and while following the GitHub docs, I have come across several roadblocks.
For example, each form field can accept a description attribute, such as
- type: input
id: provider
attributes:
label: Provider API Endpoint / Documentation
description: Please provide links to the API endpoint, and any known documentation
validations:
required: true
However, for the use case I am working on, some form fields do not require user input. These fields are of type: markdown and cannot accept a description attribute. This makes it difficult for all fields to look consistent in terms of style and I will need to do more research in order to resolve this issue.
Conclusion
Although it has just been one week, I have already learned so much from my experiences during Hacktoberfest. It was definitely intimidating at first, but it was easier to get involved than I expected and it feels very rewarding to be able to contribute to several different projects. I look forward to completing my second pull request and continuing to work on others in the weeks to come!
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