My Experience Of First Time Participating in Hacktoberfest 2024

This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience

🔥 Introduction

This was my first time to participate in hacktobefest and also the first time I participated in a open source competition. I learned a lot from it and I am happy that my 2 pr has been accepted😃

❄️ How I heard about hacktoberfest?

I heard about it from DEV community. As I love to participate in competiton organised by DEV community, I was looking for the upcoming competition and I found hacktoberfest competition. After that I google about it and find more information about it.

I also found some video of unboxing hacktoberfest 2022 swags. But I was a bit sad about hearing that this time the participates will only get digital badges cause I never get any swags on completing competition (actually this was my first time participating in a big competition and i want to flex them to my friends😅)

⚡️ My journey

I want to share one thing. Before participating in this competition, when I saw a repo with many contributers I thought that they first form a team and only the members can contribute. Well, I was wrong about that 🤔.

Also I dont have idea about how to forking a repo or how to create a branch and the idea behind it. Also for updating my repo I use the vscode feature

Now lets come on the point 😅

⭐️ Registeration

I registered for hacktoberfest on 13 october cause I was a little busy. After registering, I start finding a repo for contribution. I spend the whole day looking for the project 🥲.

✨️ Finding a Repo for Contribution

I want to contribute in a repo which are popular but when i saw the issue i was like what the hell is this?🥹 SDKs, unit test, bugs, etc. You know what i have 1 and half year experience but i have spend much time in frontend. I also learned nodejs and express but i haven't worked much with Api and those repos also have some modules that i never heard of. All this opened my eyes 😶. Now, i feel i am a bad programmer 😭. But when you are a student, you dont get enough time for coding 😮‍💨.

So, my whole day was waste. On the second day, I finally find a repo named Mid West Pumkin. And i get assigned for responsive layout. I was very happy about that 🥳. This was the first time I was assigned. Then, the next day I complete the work and send the first pr. My second pr was also on responsive layouts . The third issue was adding a dark mode with local storage. I choose this because i never worked with local storage before.

My first three prs was on the same repo. Later, I found a repo named Mini-projects. I made a password strength checker and send a pr and it was also accepted 🥳.

🎉 Achievements

After my first pr was accepted by the maintainer, I got a badge on github. It was the pull shark. I was very happy to get my first badge🤩. Also my two pr has been accepted and a got level 2 hacktoberfest badge. Now, I am waiting for my remaining two pr to be accepted 🔥

🌈 Conclusion

It was a nice experience. I see many troubles and issue but at the end I was able to submit 4 prs. Now, I hope my remaining two pr will be accepted too. Then, I can say with proud that a made a difference 🔥. I know my contributions are very small but it was the first time. But dont forget that Quantity is fun but Quality is key 🔑. This quote help me at every point in the competition. And a big thanks to Digital Ocean for organising Hacktoberfest ♥️

Happy coding 🎉