Going into October, I knew I wanted to complete Hacktoberfest, but since my schedule was a little busy, I wasn't sure it was going to happen. Add on to that the fact that every time I see something labelled as "good first issue" or "beginner", I spend three seconds looking at it and then assume I can't do it ... I didn't think I'd be able to get over that fear and contribute to open source software.
On October 10th, I completed Hacktoberfest. Here's how it happened:
PR #1 - I was invited to complete a technical challenge for a job I'm in the interview process with, and to show them my work, I was asked to put in a PR on the repository with the challenge.
PR #2 & #3 - My personal website (shameless plug) is technically open source (because the code is publicly available on GitHub), and when I post a new blog every week, it involves 2 PRs - I write the blog on its own branch, then PR that to my master branch, which contains everything I've recently worked on. Once I'm ready for the blog (or any other change) to go live, I PR to my deploy branch, which triggers an automatic build of the website. I do my best to post a new blog once a week, and these two PRs covered my blog for October 7th.
PR #4 - An issue on Gatsby asked contributors to update the case of titles of pages in documentation, as well as making other changes to fit the Style Guide. I did this for about 5-6 pages and put in a PR. I have since put in two more PRs in Gatsby related to this issue.
I didn't think I'd be able to put in PRs to 4 large repositories. And I still think that's the case. Having PRs to my repository count has been a game-changer for me. I would have been able to complete my 4 PRs on blog posts alone, but I still wanted to contribute to something else - and I did that with my Gatsby contribution.
Overall, I'd consider this a successful Hacktoberfest. I'm still hoping to contribute more (I need more Gatsby contributions to get to Level 2 swag) and to new repos, but I'm happy about how this month went and glad to be a Hacktoberfest finisher (assuming all of my PRs pass the review period)!
Top comments (3)
Congratulations! I feel completely connected with the "I assume I can't do it ...". But in my case, I think sometimes it's just me being lazy.
This is awesome, Sarah! The great thing about Hacktoberfest is that everyone can contribute, no matter how experienced one is! Hope you enjoyed :D
Congratulations!