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Anil Seervi
Anil Seervi

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Winning my First Hacktoberfest!

Hello 👋🏽 to Everyone reading this.

This is my first post on dev.to and I'm so excited to tell the journey of my first Hacktoberfest Event.

Backstory

It all started before the month of hacktoberfest when I came across a post in dev.to which showcased winning swag by contributing to Open-Source. I love contributing to Open-Source and I straight away checked the official website and waited for the registration to start. As I was earlier to this before the start of month October, I registered right away when the registrations opened.

I came to know that last year was disastrous for some repo maintainers because of the spam they had to deal with. So as I went through the rules for participating in this year's event and it was obvious that organizers would make it more strict this time to avoid any spam.

Main Event

My first PR to count towards the event was : https://github.com/kimlimjustin/xplorer/pull/108 which was on 1st Oct.
I was already contributing to the kimlimjustin/xplorer repo(which btw is a well-designed cross-platform file-explorer you might wanna check out!) before the hacktoberfest kicked-off and as this is my first event I didn't know how the PR's were counted and all.

It was only when I checked the official website for any update I came to know that a PR had already been counted towards the event and the repo I submitted to was participating in the event.😅

Seeing that already 1 out of 4 PR was already done, I was on a rampage to find more repos tagged with the hacktoberfest labels to contribute to.

Contributions

Here's the list of the PR's that I submitted, counted towards the event :

If you'll look at all the PR's I've made during this time, you'll notice that all of them are minor yet notable changes and these contributions meet the criteria for being counted towards the hacktoberfest event.

I'm also a newbie to Open-source and have only been able to make minor doc changes for this time's event. I'm starting to get the hang of it now by actually interacting with maintainers and other contributors. It's such a welcoming community who guide beginners with such patience.

Results

As the minimun PRs required to win some swag is 4, mine were only waiting for the review period of 14 days to complete today.
How to win Hacktoberfest
This time official event swag include:
Hacktoberfest 2021 T-shirt swag

These rewards can be claimed after 4 of you're PRs have successfully passed the review.

Thank you for reading this article.
And Congrats if you've also won this time hacktoberfest event.🎉🎉

Socials

Update

I've recieved the dev.to Hacktoberfest 2021 badge and it can be seen on my profile.

Top comments (21)

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mrvabs profile image
Vaibhav

I've received my first Hactoberfest swag

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi

Awesome

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi
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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Congrats!

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi

Thanks ! ;)

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arpitlekhwar profile image
Arpit Lekhwar

Have you received it?

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi

I've claimed the t-shirt.
It'll probably arrive the destination in December.

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extinctsion profile image
Aditya Sharma

Has it arrived?

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi

Not yet.

You can join their discord to know more.

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avishkachandrawansha profile image
Avishka Chandrawansha

Congrats!

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Anil Seervi

Thanks!!

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aboss123 profile image
Ashish Bailkeri

Congratulations!

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Anil Seervi

Thanks 🙏

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Anil Seervi

Thanks!! 🎉

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atomicman profile image
Faizan Khan

Congratulations! 👏👏👏

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Anil Seervi

Thank You! 😇

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yaqoah profile image
YAQOAH

Sick!
Could you share some tips to people who are also new to open source? that will help loads and congratulations :)

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anilseervi profile image
Anil Seervi

Yeah sure and thank you.

If you're a beginner, Firstly I suggest you to search for issues labeled good-first-issues , though most of them seem to be taken or assigned to others, it'd be nice if you take a look at how you can take your first step towards claiming your first issue to contribute.

There's no hurry to start big, your contribution can be small as a typo at this moment. You can find many of these on documentational type repos. I recommend you to make 1 or 2 these kind of PRs and not overwhelm maintainers with more as they have many other big things to deal with.

After that, when you've made your first contribution this way, you can search for issues on the repo of the languages and frameworks that you are familiar with. If you are not fully sure of what to do, you can always ask the maintainers on what further steps are needed to be taken ; considering you already know a portion of the solution or even completely.
Always interact with the maintainers as it'll give you more insight :)

Then you'll get the hang of it and probably will also start creating some big issues and solutions.

I hope this you and the beginners to Open-Source.

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Samyuktha Sudhakar

Congratulations 🥳

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Anil Seervi

Thanks! 🎉