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Sdu
Sdu

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Ok I knew contributing to open source was fun but no one told me it would be this easy :satisfied:

I honestly didn't think I would be able to finish the hacktoberfest challenge, let alone in such short amount of time. Still I feel like I am not done participating.

I first heard of hacktoberfest last year when I had been a member of Dev.to for just a couple of months and struggling with getting my open source app off the ground. I focused on working on my own project because I believed to contribute to another person's or organisation's codebase you have to be super skilled. While asking for help with my own issues I was facing, another community member subbramanil opened a PR just for a single unit test file and took me through what the contribution was and why he was doing it, as confused and excited as I was. Here's one inspiring piece:

A year later. Still I didn't want to contribute to anything because I felt I wasn't going to be good enough. I read so many posts everywhere about how people contributed even it was just a single line of documentation in a README.md and that really pumped me up to actually doing something. (I still didn't)

What got me to stop procrastinating about participating is the fact that everyone in my office was either already participating or being encouraged to. Plus I wouldn't want to see a bunch of beautiful hacktoberfest T-shirts at work knowing that I could've gotten one too but didn't do anything about it.

This past Friday, I found easy prey. I saw this

Add JSDoc comments for better IDE support #27

LBBO avatar
LBBO posted on

JSDoc comments can be added to most methods to clarify not only their purpose and usage, but also their parameter's expected types. Since this project is not written in TypeScript, IDEs could use these comments instead in order to provide useful code completion etc.

Please direct any PR towards the refactor-everything branch and only work on lib/netflix2.class.js as this is soon going to replace lib/netflix2.js.

The thing is, I've been writting comments all my live (minus the years I didn't know about programming) I mean how hard can it be?
I submitted a pull request, then BOOM!! 1/4 PRs for hacktoberfest was done. I was so exited that I submitted 2 more pull requests to other repos in one day.

As a bonus to myself, I submitted a pull request to the Dev.to android project.

GitHub logo forem / DEV-Android

DEV Community Android App

DEV Android πŸ’

This is the official repository for the dev.to's Android app.

Get it on Google Play

Design ethos

DEV Android is an WebView based application. This application is inspired by Basecamp's approach. We will grow to include more native code over time.

By leveraging webviews as much as possible, we can smoothly sync up with our web dev work. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.

Contributions

We expect contributors to abide by our underlying code of conduct. All conversations and discussions on GitHub (issues, pull requests) and across dev.to must be respectful and harassment-free.

System Requirements

You will need to have Android Studio 3.5 or up installed.

Usage

$ ./gradlew tasks --group=custom
------------------------------------------------------------
Tasks runnable from root project
------------------------------------------------------------

Custom tasks
------------
androidTest - Run android instrumentation tests
hello - Hello World task
…
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Top comments (20)

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Nice post.

Procrastinatination is not a always a bad thing.

For me (edited) it's a symptom that what I intend to do is not simple enough yet.

I have a list of simple useful things you can contribute at the end of this

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sctm74 profile image
SCTM74

Procrastination is significantly more complicated than that and a self destructive behavior. Stick to what you have competence in (computer science). What works for you may only work for you. After reading your comments, it's ostensibly a poor rationalization. Try honesty regardless of where it leads you. "This above all: To thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man." Polonious, Hamlet

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

What works for you may only work for you.

That part is right. I have edited my comment.

On the other hand, I have no intention to "stick to computer science".

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sctm74 profile image
SCTM74 • Edited

Then you are operating outside your competency. The number one guide in medicine and in psychology IS NEVER OPERATE OUTSIDE YOUR COMETENCY. You have no idea how much harm you can inflict upon others when you do. A single sentence can dramatically change a persons life. I've had the fortune of knowing those I've helped with the right words. I dread the thought of imagining who I've done the opposite the wrong words. We all must be more careful of what we say to others: especially when we give advice to how others should manage their life/problems. I'm sure you don't realize it but, your response contradicts itself. Read it again and think about it.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

We all must be more careful of what we say to others

Good point and I get it.

I'm sure you don't realize it but, your response contradicts itself. Read it again and think about it.

I have read it again and can't find which of my sentance is wrong.

(Sentance 1) Procrastinatination is not always a bad thing.

The mathematical contrary of "not always" is "at least in one case".
I know "at least one case" and more where procrastination is good. I have bipolar tendencies, and when I am in a maniac phase, procrastination is a very useful tool.

(Sentance 2, edited) For me, t's a symptom that what I intend to do is not simple enough yet.

As fas as I'm concerned, I am inside my competency when I talk about myself.

Then you are operating outside your competency.

Is that worse that letting people suffer alone?

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thomascutting profile image
Thomas

Hi Jean β€” I really like breaking down procrastination to one idea of looking at macro not micro. In my experience when breaking down big picture items to our team, making these milestones β€œedible” is my #1 focus. Thank you for sharing! Have a great one. -Tom

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melconcoast profile image
Krishna Vyas

Thanks for sharing !

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thomascutting profile image
Thomas

Thank you for sharing, Beautus. In your article you mentioned you added JSDocs to a repo. Would love to hear more about that first step. Did hacktoberfest provide repos or provide information on how to find repos to contribute to? All the best! -Tom

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

For example with codetriage.com
And plenty of things at dev.to/t/hacktoberfest

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

Another useful site is issuehub.io

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subbramanil profile image
Subbu Lakshmanan

Hey Bud,

It's great to see your post! And Thank you for mentioning my post :)

I'm participating in Hactoberfest this year as well. Plan to write a blog/series of blogs once I finish.

Looking forward to see your posts as well!

Cheers!!

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

No thank you. I doubt I'd have done half of all this without the help.

NB: The app is sitting on 56k+ downloads on Google Play alone

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sonandrew profile image
Andrew Jackson

Haha β€œI still did nothing” <β€” that was me last year.

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

After you send in that one PR, everything else falls into place πŸ€žπŸ˜…

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vypxl profile image
vypxl

I'm so grateful for your post. I could not participate until a week ago due to personal reasons, then I thought I would not have enough time for completing the challenge.
But I saw this post and it really motivated me again to just try it and now BAM four PR's submitted, three already merged!

The feeling of approval is just so satisfying. Please try it out everyone, there's no real downside from contributing and it doesn't have to cost much time too :)

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yourwpmadesimple profile image
Wayne Hatter

Hey, man. Can you provide the first step to contributing? How? Where?

Thanks!!

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

Oh man, this is a tough one to answer from the top of my head. But I've read some pretty interesting posts that I think can answer your questions, or at least give you an idea.

dev.to/mrahmadawais/how-to-start-c...

dev.to/jerodsanto/get-your-hacktob...

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yourwpmadesimple profile image
Wayne Hatter

Cool! Thanks, bro.

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petecapecod profile image
Peter Cruckshank

Yes it can seen kind of scary at first, but once you start doing it you realize that's it's fun to help! And usually the people are great πŸ˜„πŸ‘

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

I swear they're the best. Great experience I've ever had. With every PR, there's something new that I learn.