Hacktoberfest 2018 Summary
October 31, 2018. Today is not only Halloween 🎃 but also the last day of Hacktoberfest 2018, and it is time to summarize it.
What is Hacktoberfest?
For those of you, who have started following my blog recently:
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio.
● Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in our global community!
● Five quality pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories.
My contributions
I have completed 6 Pull Requests during Hacktoberfest:
Let’s quickly review each of my contributions.
1. The Algorithms — Python
Issue: Improve Readme.
The point of this issue was to add descriptions of the algorithms implemented in this repository. I took this issue at the same time I jumped into DiveLane project (watch contribution #2), and I wanted it to be my “rescue plan” in case I struggled with DiveLane, so I could have at least one pull request submitted in my first week.
Nothing difficult in this issue, I was just pasting the text from Wikipedia into ReadMe file.
Pull Request status: Merged ✅
2. DiveLane — Universal Ethereum payment system
Issue: Add Alamofire library to the project and replace URLSession with it.
I challenged myself by taking this issue. I had just started learning Swift in September, and I didn’t have much experience in iOS development. However, I saw contributing to Swift projects as a great opportunity to gain some knowledge and experience that is why I started working on this issue. While contributing to this project, I learned Cocoa Pods, used Alamofire library, studied about URLSession.
Pull Request status: Merged ✅
3. All Algorithms — Swift
Issue: Implement any missing algorithms in Swift.
It was another project related to Algorithms in my list of contributions, but this time I worked on coding algorithms. I thought that it would be good to practice my skills in Swift programming by developing a couple of Algorithms. I added two graph algorithms to the project: Breadth-First Search and Depth-First Search.
Pull Request status: Open ⏳
There were 2 pull requests opened (that were merged later) after I submitted mine, but I didn’t hear back from maintainers and my PR is still open. This lack of activity from maintainers discourages me to contribute to this project again.
4. iOS Brave Browser
Issue: Fix iOS 11 deprecation warnings.
There were four warnings that had to be fixed. I was able to remove one warning from the project by replacing the old API with the newer one, but I couldn’t fix the other warning because I found out that they were caused by Swift compiler bug (read my blog post for more details 🔝).
Pull Request status: Merged ✅
5. Adaptive Alerting
Issue: Remove the module from the project.
I came across the issue in a Java ML project, and I decided to work on it because I didn’t work with Java for a while. This contribution wasn’t difficult, but it was useful to refresh my knowledge of Java.
Pull Request status: Merged ✅
6. Mozilla Add-ons
Issue: Remove outline from a RatingStar component when selected
I have a decent experience working with front-end, and I knew how to fix the problem described in the issue. So, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to contribute to Mozilla’s project. It was a quick CSS fix that removes the outline.
Pull Request status: Merged ✅
Overall Experience
It was so much fun participating in Hacktoberfest! I believe that it is a fantastic initiative by Twilio, GitHub, and DigitalOcean that encourages developers around the world put their skills into improving open source projects. I am happy about my performance during this month as I contributed to six different projects, enhanced my skills in iOS development, and got into the open source community! I am looking forward to g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶T̶-̶s̶h̶i̶r̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶t̶i̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶o̶r̶g̶a̶n̶i̶z̶e̶r̶s̶ participating in Hacktoberfest 2019 😁🌎🎃
