Hacktoberfest — Interlude
There’s less than two days left for Hacktoberfest so you might be thinking it’s a bit too late for an Interlude, but here’s a plot twist:
The story has only just begun.
This past week was almost surreal and at the same time the realest thing I’ve done in relation to Open Source. Last week I spoke at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium aka FSOSS.
I was given the opportunity to be a part of a Student panel called ‘Open Source: Four Students Stories’, where four of us shared our experiences in getting involved with contributing to Open Source projects. I was joined by Margaryta Chepiga, Ray Gervais and Sean Prashad.
They are each very talented and had a wide range of experience in Open Source contributions compared to me. At first, I was worried about what could I possibly have to say to add to the conversation that they couldn’t.
But that was the whole point of engaging at FSOSS. In fact, that’s the point of Hacktoberfest. We want to encourage newcomers to overcome this belief of inadequacy and take that leap. Some of the things we discussed were:
- Being willing to fail (mistakes only make us human)
- Reaching out to the community for help (They don’t bite… usually)
- Being stubborn and persistent (Try, try and try again. And if that doesn’t work keep on trying)
- Reap the rewards (whether that’s swag, cards, acknowledgement or just satisfaction from a job well done)
It was amazing to see that the audience was genuinely interested in what we had to share. I had only started to delve into open source software a couple months ago. And I’m glad to be able to share some of the valuable lessons I’ve learned in such a short time in order to encourage newcomers to try contributing to open sourced projects. After all, we only really fail if we don’t even try.
This experience came at a great time for me. I was stuck on a bug and about ready to resign myself to not getting it done and missing out on the rest of my PRs because this one was taking me so long.
And then I realized, that’s okay; it’s not the end of the world. I took a step back from that one and pursued other avenues. My last blog post mentioned that Sean helped me find an issue I could address in a reasonable amount of time. And that one inspired me for my fourth PR. I stubbornly thought, “I want that hacktoberfest t-shirt”.
The issue I addressed was for Docs explaining how to install Microsoft’s WSL. I realized now I had been underestimating how significant a simple change to a document can be. Some of the instructions were incomplete and the link provided only led the user back to the previous steps. My PR adds the needed details to install WSL via PowerShell and includes a link to the next steps.
It sounds like a simple fix and it absolutely is. But I’ve tried using faulty docs before and it is super frustrating when they aren’t what they’re supposed to be. Being able to fix that for others seems like a huge plus to me.
