Hacktoberfest
Intro
Even after I've been working as a software engineer over years, I felt still daunted when I think about participating open-source projects. This time, I stepped out of the comfort zone and tried to contribute via Hacktoberfest. By the way, if you don't know about Hacktoberfest, it is a month-long celebration of open-source software that encourages participation in giving back to the open-source community. People can receive some goods or badges once their contributions are accepted. How encouraging!
Search for projects
I always wanted to sharpen the programming language skills - Go & Python - besides work. So, I searched based on those 2 languages. I narrowed down further based on the interests. I was interested in ci/cd and cli tools lately. I ended up participating these 2 repos if you are interested in.
The process of contribution
The first step was to read the README to understand about the project. Next, I looked at open issues for contribution. If I was attracted to it, I asked the issuer to clarify requirements and assigning to me. After having a conversation, I started working on it. The implementation process was pretty similar to the regular flow I do at work - update, pull request, feedback, and merge to the main branch. The only difference was fork. Fork was useful as I could experiment and play with a repo without affecting the original one. I did take some time to run things locally and tests to see how things work before touching any codebase. Once I updated codebase and tests, I open a pull request for feedback. Thankfully, a few seasoned engineers gave me valuable feedback and I was able to improve it before merging it to the main branch. I celebrated once each pr was merged :)
What I learned from it
I had biases
- I need to be way smarter to contribute
- I need a ton of time to contribute
- I need enormous effort to contribute
I was wrong completely. I didn't have to be a genius to contribute to open source. Actually, it was all about collaboration with other passionate people to make improvements to the project I'm interested. There were issues that don't require daunting efforts.
There were other benefits that I didn't expect!
- I was able to make friends by working together
- I was able to sharpen skills way faster as I touched the real project problems
Conclusion
Hacktoberfest is finished. Yet, you can still contribute to the open-source projects! I highly recommend to anyone.
Top comments (0)