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Katie Liu
Katie Liu

Posted on • Edited on

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 😄