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Kevin J. Estevez
Kevin J. Estevez

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My hacktoberfest adventure!

It was a few years ago when I started this journey to participate in the Hacktoberfest event and I must confess I was quite nervous about it as I'm actually now too.

I've always looked up to dev who actively contribute to opensource projects since I know how difficult it is to keep up the pace and commitment it requires.

Back then in 2018 I started looking there for opensource project to contribute to during hacktoberfest and I realize even though most of them have a very strict process to get PRs accepted if there's a well defined guide to follow is because the core team is open to contributions, and if so they're also really open to help you out get started on it!

So my advice is to not be shy to start contributing and also reaching the core team with questions about the project!

I still remember that time when I received this package with that awesome T-shirt and the swag! I was excited about reaching my goal of completing the challenge.

Hacktoberfest 2018 gift

from then on I continued participating on Hacktoberfest each year but later on last year was quite great! since I moved on a step on not only looking for opensource projects to contribute to but more known repos and tools used by hundreds on devs...

Yes I'm talking about GitHub-CLI it was a great adventure! I learnt a lot from it, using Golang in good known cli tool to add a new command

The thread started from a feature request I found in the issues section inside the repo, I picked that up and starting working (even without the approval of the core team to add that new feature) I started the R&D process and implementation, asking questions about the project to the core team and building the new feature

Finally I made a PR and bum! 🀯 Pipeline failed to build the app for Windows!!! and then I realized, of course I'm trying to build a feature for a tool which is used across OS (Mac, Linux, Win) and honestly I had never done that before

It was a huge investigation phase until I finally made the feature work for the three major OS, opened up the PR and prayed πŸ™ to be accepted by the core team

Discussions stated in the code review until it turns out the core team decided that was not feature they wanted to include in the CLI.

Well! sadly it was not merged and release to the users but I got the experience of at trying it and also the added up benefit of getting all that new knowledge.

Right now I'm looking for some fun opensource project to contribute to, so if your a maintainer and want some sort of contribution please write it down in the comments so I'll check it out.

Let's go Hacking! πŸ’ͺ and thanks for reading.

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