Hi friends 👋,

I'm participating in the #100DaysOfOSS challenge by OpenSauced. Inspired by the #100DaysOfCode challenge, #100DaysOfOSS is a challenge for everyone interested in open source to learn about open source, contribute, or maintain open source projects over 100 days, starting on July 23rd.

This challenge focuses on growth. So it's about more than just contributing code. You can learn about open source by reading or watching tutorials, engaging in the community by sharing information and knowledge, or any other ways you find comfortable and doable. You can read more about how you can participate here.

You can follow my #100DaysOfOSS daily progress in my journal below.

✅ Recap: Day 28-50

I know, I know. I need to improve myself at updating my #100DaysOfOSS journey on my blog. 😅

But I can't believe that it's halfway to the 100th day! 🤩

Learning and Supports

• I attended the "Intro to OSS" workshop by OpenSauced hosted by BekahHW.

• I attended two "Open Source Hour" Twitter spaces hosted by OpenSauced.

• I attended a Twitch stream — Pizza Bake Off — with Brian and John from OpenSauced hosted by Nick Taylor.

• We heard about this VSCode extension — CodeTour — to onboard new contributors on the Twitter space with Jerome Hardaway. So, I tried it out. I think this would be useful when a project has a big codebase.

• I wrote and published a blog post about my #100DaysOfOSS journey: #100DaysOfOSS Recap: Day 15-27.

• I wrote and published an article for beginners in open source: Open Source and Git Glossary.

Supports and Collaboration

Do you know that September is Preptember? It's the time for contributors and maintainers to get ready for Hacktoberfest!

In Virtual Coffee, we annually hold Preptember as our monthly challenge in September. As part of the monthly challenge team, I spent most of my time collaborating with the team to prepare the challenge for our members to get ready for the Hacktoberfest.

I'm excited that this year, we decided to have a repository for our members who are beginners in open source to practice open source. We also use this repo for contributors and maintainers members to list the repositories we can review and recommend for Hacktoberfest.

I was thrilled when this project received the green light from our core team — even though we only had a very short time to work on all things Preptember after we got the approval!

• I had many sync and async discussions with the monthly challenges team to prepare for the Preptember challenge.

• I researched how to prepare an open-source project and created a private repo to propose the additional new format of the challenge to our core team.

• After getting approval, I made a Preptember repository for Virtual Coffee members to practice open source and list VC-verified repositories.

• I posted an announcement for our members in Slack about the new repo for the Preptember challenge.

Contributions

Virtual Coffee

• I created an issue to fix broken links in our monthly challenges pages on the website.

• I prioritized and created a pull request to fix the September and October pages so we can reuse them.

• I created a pull request to change the current challenge and update the content of the Preptember challenge on the website.

• I created an issue and a pull request to add the September newsletter to the website.

OpenSauced

When I attended the "Intro to OSS" workshop, I saw things to improve in the documentation to create a smoother contributing experience for beginners.

• I created an issue to improve the documentation (README) in the guestbook repository.

• I created a pull request for the docs improvement. I got some feedback and am still working on this.

• I assigned myself to an issue for implementing dark mode at the OpenSauced app repository. I plan to work on this collaboratively with Dominic Duffin.

Challenges

• We were behind in rolling the Preptember. I had one sleepless night, but it paid off with great teamwork!

• We are using pnpm at Virtual Coffee. Whenever I run it, it takes me a while to render the localhost, and it sometimes shuts down by itself whenever I fix multiple things. Well, it's a Windows thing. 😅 It's kind of frustrating at times. So whenever I don't have enough time to check my work locally like these times, I make and push my changes blindly. Then, I create a draft PR and let Netlify do its thing. I'll fix and make adjustments when necessary.😆

Wins and Gratitudes

• I took three days off on a weekend from #100DaysOfOSS — even from my computer! — to enjoy time with my family. 🥰

• I attended my first-ever workshop!

• My pull requests for Virtual Coffee got merged:

  • Updated some content in the resources on the website.
  • Fixed broken links and wordings in the website's September and October challenge pages.
  • Changed the current challenge and updated the September challenge page on the website.

Final Words

If you just heard about the #100DaysOfOSS challenge and want to participate, there is still time. You can start now and join us 🙌!

And if you're doing #100DaysOfOSS, how was your experience? Do share it with us in the comment below 😄!

🖼️ Credit cover image: unDraw

Thank you for reading! Last, you can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky. Let's connect! 😊