My Experience
My first Hacktoberfest has been a long one, spanning all of October. I saw other students had gotten all their PRs merged a week early, so I knew I had to hurry and finish mine as well. I just barely managed to get all 4 of my PRs approved within October, which was a stressful experience. But, overall I feel like I learned a lot about open-source, GitHub and Git.
I found the most difficult part to be actually finding viable issues. Issues often tended to be taken very quickly, or were too complex and required development experience with the project. I spent each day looking at new issues that matched my search criteria and I found brief moments of success between long droughts of good issues.
My PRs
My first PR was on golly-bot a discord bot. My PR added the feature of sending a goodbye message tagging the leaving user.
My second PR was on reddit-image-viewer, which allows users to purely view visual media on reddit. My PR changed the default video player to use Hls.js. This way, videos could be played with sound.
My third PR was once again on reddit-image-viewer. My PR added the title of the post which linked to the original post under each image/video. This was in response to clicking images linking to the original post, while videos being clicked played the video. Thus, there was a need to place the title to link to the post.
My fourth PR was on word-cloud-generator, which allows users to generate word clouds using various settings. My PR added capitalisation settings to the settings panel, allowing for users to specify the capitalisation of the words in the word cloud.
Tips
- Get searching early, and often
In my first week and third week I had little success in finding a good issue to work on. However, I found sporadic success in the second and last weeks. There may be some dry weeks where it is difficult to find something good to work on. However, you should try to set yourself up for success and be persistent in your search for issues that you can work on. Keep searching for issues and eventually good ones will come your way.
- Cast a wide net
Try to look for as many different issues as possible. Search for any projects that use the languages you know. Search for any projects that use languages you would like to know. Search for issues that under different tags. Try to cast as wide a net as possible. That way you can broaden your horizons and see as many candidate issues as possible, even if many of them may not be viable for you.
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