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Katie Liu
Katie Liu

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Hacktoberfest Recap!

I'm very happy to announce that four of my merged PRs have been approved by the hacktoberfest team and I have received my hall of fame entry and reward kit!

hall of fame

hacktoberfest profile

list of PRs

I have blogged about four out of the five PRs shown in the above list:

Issue Type Issue PR Blog
Week 1 PR documentation fix Issue Corrected the linked to sample files in README.md Blog
Week 2 PR small bug fix Issue FIX: prevent sending one word question Blog
Week 3 PR proposed UI enhancement Issue Allow clicking checklist section titles to expand/collapse sections Blog
Week 4 PR intermediate-level enhancement Issue FEAT: Displayed total registered users in homepage Blog
Additional PR small bug fix Issue Hide Follow button for Lists created by Current User N/A

I did an extra additional PR since my Week 1 documentation PR was not merged, and I wanted to have 4 merged PRs to complete hacktoberfest. Unfortunately I did not have the time to write an extra blog post on that PR.

My Progress in Open Source!

In week 1, I started out with little to no open source experience and never having done any open source contributions on any real world open source projects. My first pull request was fixing a few broken links in a README file. In week 2, I completed a small two line fix to add validation to a form. In week 3, I tested out a project and raised an issue myself, which I later fixed. In week 4, I wrote an API and implemented caching to localStorage.

At the beginning of this month, I was worried about whether I could find any issues that I have the knowledge to work on, but halfway through I started having a lot of fun coding. I even started looking for more challenging issues to work on.

I was able to work with many different technologies during hacktoberfest, and there are even more that are not listed here that I explored while looking for issues.

Learnings

I learned a lot about the different technologies, how to set them up, and how to use code to interact with them. For example in week 2, I set up Notion database and Firebase for authentication. In week 4, I used Notion APIs to retrieve data from the database. I used a Valibot method in week 2 to add validation to a form. I learned about husky and how it was set up to automatically format my code with Prettier and ESLint.

I got to put the knowledge I learned in school to fix documentation, fix minor bugs in the UI (#67, #70), make enhancements in HTML pages, write event listeners, write APIs, and implement caching in localStorage.

Most importantly, I learned the process of contributing to Open Source code! This includes reading contribution guidelines, checking out existing coding conventions. Also communicating with the project owner about how they want a fix implemented, receiving feedback, and revising my code accordingly. This is all good preparation and practice for working as a software developer. I highly encourage everyone to participate in the next hacktoberfest :)

Check out these Open Source Projects

I want to give a shout out to the projects that I had the pleasure of contributing to!

Top comments (1)

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taikedz profile image
Tai Kedzierski

Congrats and well done for the write ups, and crucially the thoughts on the experience overall, I'm sure they will be helpful to new contributors πŸ˜„