[DPS909] Hacktoberfest Recap
Hacktoberfest 2021 has finally come to an end. Here’s what I have accomplished so far.
Starting off simple…
For my first Hacktoberfest issue, I was asked to make a two-line fix to a TypeScript Discord bot project called Rosalia Nightsong. It was a simple task as the maintainer already pointed out what code is missing and where to put it. That said, it was still a great opportunity for me to get used to the open-source contribution process.
Speedrunning with two pull requests in a week
The second Hacktoberfest issue I found was for a module of OpenStreetMap, one of the largest open-source maps applications. The module is called name-suggestion-index, which is used for suggesting brands or places of interest for OpenStreetMap. The issue I worked on was also very simple, as I just need to put a string of JSON data into a JSON file within the project’s data folder.
My pull request was quickly accepted. However, I felt that this issue was too simple and too similar to my first one, so I decided to do one more contribution for the week. The third project I found was NearBeach, a project management system written in Vue and Django. I was tasked with removing “unnecessary” else/elif blocks (you can find more info on what I mean by “unnecessary” in my blog here). This was a very insightful contribution, as I got to learn about a good coding practice.
Third week
My next project was Greenstand’s Treetracker, a program that connects tree donators and actual tree growers. I thought it was a very realistic and impactful project, so I was excited to make a contribution. The issue I found was to fix a visual bug where there was an unwanted gap in some of their pages. This was a React project, and after some hours playing around with the code, I finally was able to produce a fix. It was not a big issue, but I was glad I worked on it because it was the first one that I figured out the solution on my own, instead of just “put this line here and that line there”. This is also the first project where I had to format my commit message in a certain way in order to submit a pull request, which I thought was a cool git feature.
Final showdown
The next challenge I decided to tackle was with another Discord bot called EarTensifier. It was a fairly big project, as the bot was being used in over 40,000 Discord servers, according to the project’s statistics. The issue I found was to add a new command to the bot to delete a certain amount of the bot’s messages. I learned tons of new things from working on this project, including working with the discord.js API, how a Discord bot project is structured, and how to test it using my own Discord server. I also got to communicate with the project maintainer to together figure out the best approach for this issue. With their help, I was able to successfully create the new command for the bot. This was the most insightful project I have worked on so far, and I am glad that I took the issue.
Conclusion
I have learned a lot from this event. It also feels good to be able to make contributions to actual real-life projects. I am glad I got the opportunity to participate in this year’s Hacktoberfest. Looking forward to more open-source work!
Cheers!
oh and a meme to end it
