Hacktoberfest — Week One
The month of October this year marks the fifth iteration of Hacktoberfest — a month-long celebration of open source software organized by DigitalOcean with Github and Twilio. During this month if you make more than five Pull Requests (PRs) on GitHub you earn a t-shirt. The goal is to support open source software and generate more interest in the community and it’s awesome.
For my opensource class, we are expected to participate and complete 5 PRs this month. At first, it sounded like we had to dive into the deep end but contributing to open source projects isn’t too difficult especially this month where repository maintainers are expecting a lot of newcomers like myself.
Before my open source class started I had no idea how to navigate the open source community and how to even begin to think I could contribute. The best thing I learned so far is that I cannot be afraid to ask. Take the initiative to ask questions; ask how to do something; ask for clarification; ask for help; etc.
My goal this month is to try different things so I can get a better idea of my own preferences because I found when initially looking for issues to work on I didn’t have any preferences to help narrow down my search.
For my first PR, I found a project that had examples templates for the Hepek project and was written in Scala. Hepek provides templates to make rendering things more simple. The repository I worked in was Hepek-examples. Scala is a language I never worked with before, but I wasn’t worried because, as I said, I wanted something I never worked on before.
It wasn’t difficult and the issue lived up to the label as a ‘good first issue.’ All I had to do was add a markdown example similar to the other examples that were already there. Although I never used Scala before, I simply looked at the other examples and used the same format to create the markdown example and it helped that the owner clarified a few steps in the issue. My first pull request was thus created on the first of October. I did have to make a few adjustments before it could be merged but nothing major.
Now that I have successfully contributed to a Scala project I can cross that off my list for this month. I have a few repositories that I’ve starred but, going forward, I want to start narrowing down my choices based on what the project is actually about. If it is in a language I haven’t worked in yet then all the better. And I really want that t-shirt.
