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Qiwen Yu
Qiwen Yu

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Hacktoberfest: Recap

This is to summarise my experience during GitHub Hacktoberfest 2021. Overall, it is very important and meaningful to me. This is my first time to make contributions to open source projects. Along the journey, I learnt a lot of how a real world large open source project maintained and operated, and I received a lot of help from project maintainers.

At this stage, I am still a rookie in software development and open source project area. However, the biggest difference on me between now and a month earlier is that I am now feel no hesitate to make contributions to open source project.

Thus, I would like to share my opinions to the old me or someone who is still trying to make his/her first contribution to a real-world contribution:

  • Always keep in mind, there are a lot of opensource projects welcome contributors with even very limited levels of programming skills.
  • Read guidelines and communicate actively is very important
  • Ask for help from project maintainers and documentations
  • Small contributions are good contributions, there is no need to write a large chunk of code
  • Spend time reading code
  • Start with easy issue, such as good-first-issue
  • Write documentations and tests are very important

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