Hacktoberfest Summary

Hi!

Overview

This was my first ever participation in Hacktoberfest and I really glad I knew about that. It's amazing how people are contributing to all projects, even if some are pretty straightforward. With every project, there are so many features popping into the head. Everyone wants to feel himself as a part of software.

What I learned

• git commands

Git is very tricky sometimes, but it turns out it's not complicated once you practice it for a while. Commands that are better to know before you start contributing:

git add

git commit

git status

git push

git merge

git clone

git fetch

git pull

git rebase -i HEAD~3 // e.g. for squashing last 3 commits into one

git checkout -b <branch-name> // to create a new branch from current branch and jump into it

git reset // e.g. git reset --hard ~HEAD, to move the pointer to the HEAD, meaning all your current changes will be gone.

git stash // to stash your changes and pop them another time

git remote add <name> <link> // to add remote repo

One blog is not even enough for must know git commands, but these are the most important once to me.

• Competitions for issues

There are a lot of people that want to take issue. It's just a matter of who is the first one :)

• People are more likely to take easy issues and not go with challenging

This is very interesting topic, that's what I noticed for myself. People are tend to take the issues, that they are familiar with.

How do you know if you are capable of fixing certain issue? What if you are just underestimating your abilities(which is mostly like to be true) ? Great questions to ask yourself :)

Yes, big projects require you a lot of time to understand how everything works, it's just not a comfort zone for us yet, and, of course, brain treats it as a threat :)

However, once you spend some time working on big project, you will get used to it and pull it into your comfort zone.

• Improve your skills

It will never be that you will have to solve same issue, that you already solved in the past. It might be similar but requires another look at it. All of them are different and give you some challenge!

• Prettier is a must

If you leave prettier out of the box for your project, you will encounter different code style, and eventually it worsens understanding of the code.

Best practice is to make sure that code is written in one style and formatted in the same way.

• Too many issues

The point of that, is that you might struggle a lot with the amount of issue that are there. To make it less overwhelming, the best thing to do is sort the issues based on your language and issue type(e.g. feature, bug, good-first-issue).

Instead of randomly scrolling through the bunch of issues, it's better to stick with one language and some labels that fit you. This way you are more likely to find a good one, that is for your abilities.

• Open source projects teach you

When you contribute to certain project, it's very likely to be that you are not familiar yet with framework or any other technology they are using. That's where you have a chance to learn it. When, if not know ?

Open source projects push you to learn new things and develop yourself. All you have to do is be persistent and not give up once something is not working with first try.

Summary

I would love to thank all project maintainers for their time and PRs accepted. Best morning starts with PR have been merged :D

Hacktoberfest gave me such a pleasant time. Next year, I will contribute again, but with more experience :)

I hope you enjoyed your Hacktoberfest and thank you for reading :)

Let's connect on LinkedIn to share experience. I'm open to everyone :)