My first GitHub pull request and Hacktoberfest 2017!
Post Summary
- Last month (October 2017), I created my first pull request to an open source projects on GitHub by joining the event named “Hacktoberfest”.
- This event is organized by Github and DigitalOcean.
- The rules is that anyone who makes four or more pull requests on any public GitHub repository will receive a special shirt and stickers (for free!!!).
- Apart from DigitalOcean, Sendgrid also giveaway a shirt and sticker to people who make at least one pull request to any SendGrid repos and it is merged to the master branch. (Any pull request which isn’t merged will not count.)
- At the end, I created more than 100 pull requests on GitHub! (Half of them are pull requests for SendGrid repos. > <)
My story started in September 2017 when I saw a post from blognone about the hacktoberfest event. At first I didn’t care much about it and I just let it goes like other events. But at the beginning of October, I decided to give myself a try joining this event.
“Rules
To get a shirt, you must make four pull requests between October 1–31 in any timezone. Pull requests can be to any public repo on GitHub, not just the ones we’ve highlighted. The pull request must contain commits you made yourself. Pull requests reported by maintainers as spam or that are automated will be marked as invalid and won’t count towards the shirt.” - Hacktoberfest page
At first, I thought that I can’t make any pull request to any repo due to I didn’t have much knowledge about programming. However, I found out that there were many repos and issues created to serve all GitHub beginners (like me) who want to join this event. (like adding their names to a file or adding a line of code.) So I started my first pull request with this one.
About 10 mins later, I finished my first pull request as easy as pie! I continue searching for issue to work on. I have done about 5–10 pull requests during the first few days.
One day, I googled “hacktoberfest 2017” and I saw an image of this beautiful tee.
I clicked on the link to the website and found about SendGrid’s swag giveaway!
I started looking at those merged pull request on SendGrid’s repo and found out that some of them are typo correction. So I correct some typo in the document and created my first pull request. When it is merged, I feel very happy. I continued finding issues and created pull requests until I got about 7 merged pull requests in 4 days.
On 20 October, I found this SendGrid twitter post.
Why I missed this! SendGrid has a leaderboard to show how many merged pull request each user has on their GitHub repos. I looked at mine and see that I’m on the fourth place with 7 merged pull requests. I want to be one of the top three so I start a journey which I called a ‘crazy contributing journey’.
Through the last two weeks of October, I searched for issues on SendGrid’s repos every morning and tried to do as best as I can to improve the project. Most of them are adding some missing docs and correcting typos. Some of them are technical stuff which I got through by the help of other contributors in the project. (that they are very lovely > <)
At the end of October, I have a total of 111 pull request on GitHub! This is amazing! I can’t imagine that I would create this amount of PRs. Big thanks to the SendGrid leaderboard for encouraging me to contribute to SendGrid’s repos.
I would say that this event is a huge step for a programming newbie like me to the open source world. If you would like to start a pull request, just go for it. See you next year, Hacktoberfest!
