This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience
Hello there! This post is a reflection on my Hacktoberfest participation this year. It also turned out to be my first time participating in Hacktoberfest and was a great opportunity to learn more about open-source.
What's Hacktoberfest and how I found out about it?
I was scrolling through DEV community posts when I learned about Hacktoberfest. I was (and am) hungry for competitions and events, hence, this wasn't something I could pass. Hacktoberfest is a month-long event to celebrate open-source devs and to learn to be one of them. It's a great opportunity to learn and refine programming, problem-solving and social skills.
Signing up and choosing the right repo
I immediately signed up for the event but was having difficulty choosing the repositories to contribute. Most of the online repositories dealt with tech I was not proficient with. Looking through a few GitHub issues made me realize that I wouldn't be able to contribute with my current level of knowledge. This made me realize that programming tends to be a skill that requires constant change and learning. I wanted to contribute to a repo with lots of opportunities to code. I browsed through GitHub and found lots of repos that allow contributors to add their programs/codes which could help newbies and other programmers learn. I decided to contribute to AI-Octofusion and A-Z Python programs. These two awesome repos created by Techiral(shoutout to him!) would later go on to accept my very first PRs!
The contribution
I started contributing programs in the hope that they would be useful to someone, somewhere, sometime. My contributions included some of the programs that I put a lot of effort into. It's important to realize that developers use open source to learn new things and help them in their journey. I felt I had the opportunity to give back to society through this event. Throughout the month, I made 11 contributions, out of which 5 were merged. 2 of those contributions are yet to be accepted by the Hacktoberfest team(will be accepted 2 days from the time of writing).
Key takeaways
Looking back, I feel truly satisfied and accomplished. Collaborating with other developers was something I had never done before. Discovering the open-source community and being able to contribute to it was a real delight.
In the (not-so-distant) future, I want to contribute to many more open-source projects. I wish to upskill myself and make a greater impact.
Tell me what you did during Hacktoberfest in the comments!
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