Olibhia Ghosh

Posted on Nov 4

My First Hacktoberfest Experience

#devchallenge #hacktoberfestchallenge #hacktoberfest #opensource

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

Hello everyone!

I’m glad to share that this year I participated in Hacktoberfest 2024 and I completed it successfully. Today I will be sharing my Hacktoberfest experience with you all with the hope that you will learn something or get inspired from my experience.

So let’s start with What Hacktoberfest actually is.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long annual celebration of open-source software. It takes place in October.

For more details check the website: https://hacktoberfest.com/.

How did I get to know about it?

As I am active on Twitter and share my learnings there, I got to know about Hacktoberfest from there only.

You can check my Twitter profile here: https://x.com/OlibhiaGhosh .

One of my Twitter friend shared his registration for Hacktoberfest around 15 days before October and that caught my interest. I explored more about that and found it interesting.

This buzz around the Hacktoberfest gave me the kick to participate and I registered for it.

And this was all about how it started.

What were my expectations from it?

Frankly speaking, as I was previously well-known to the world of open source and had already contributed, I was confident about making successful contributions.

But I was also quite nervous about the fact that in this rush of Hacktoberfest month, would I be able to get myself assigned to 4 or more issues or not.

And I jumped into this with this mixture of confidence and nervousness.

Getting Started

Now, let’s talk about the main things that are how I managed to find suitable repositories, got assigned to issues, and was also able to successfully get my PR merged.

At first, I will share how I found repositories to contribute.

How I found repositories to contribute?

There are several ways of doing this but I will be sharing the one that worked for me.

I went to the website of Hacktoberfest and dived into the participation section. There I got the list of repositories participating on GitHub and other platforms.

From there I selected my preferred coding language and filtered out the repositories so that I could contribute easily.

Note: One thing that you should keep in mind is that you should select those repositories which has been updated recently or had the last activity recently.

How I found the issues for my contribution?

Now, after selecting the repositories, I opened it, and at first had a look on the Readme. This helps you to understand the projects better.

Then I dived into the issues section. Then I filtered out the desired issue on two basis:

First, I filtered out all the issues with the label #hacktoberfest using GitHub’s advanced search option.
Secondly, I filtered it out more by selecting “No assignees” from the assignee’s section under GitHub’s advanced search so that I don’t waste time on exploring the issues that are already assigned.

My Contributions

This was all about how I found repositories and issues. After finding the issue that was still not assigned and that I could work on, I made a comment that “I want to work on this issue“ and then got assigned by the maintainer.

Now let me share how I contributed and what my contributions were.

FreeCodeCamp

The first issue I got assigned to was of FreeCodeCamp. The issue was to create a quiz on functional programming in a specified format. I created the quiz and sent the pull request.

I was asked for some modifications from the maintainers. After all the modifications my PR got merged. This happiness of getting your PR merged hits differently.

Contributing to FreeCodeCamp was really a big thing for me.

Here is my PR: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/pull/56497

The most important thing I learned from here was that before contributing to any project make sure that you have read the contributing guidelines. Also, be patient as this thing takes time.

ToolJet

The second was an issue in ToolJet which was a documentation fix. As soon as I was assigned I did the changes and made a PR. The maintainers suggested some changes. I made the changes and finally, my PR got approved and merged.

Here is my PR: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/pull/10943

Completing 2 of them gave me the boost to complete Hacktoberfest 2024.

Then I proceeded to find the third issue.

Makaut Buddy

I found the 3rd issue here where I needed to align the profile icon on the home page. It was a UI fix. I made the changes and my PR got approved.

Here is my PR: https://github.com/Arindam200/makaut_buddy/pull/166

And now comes the last one.

My 4th PR didn’t follow this standard process of getting assigned and then contributing. In this case, while I was exploring the project Makaut Buddy, I found some inconsistencies in the UI.

I thought of opening an issue as this project was actively participating in Hacktoberfest 2024. I opened the issue and also got assigned to it for work along with the #hacktoberfest label on the issue.

That gave me the final relief. I made all the changes and my PR got merged.

Here is my PR: https://github.com/Arindam200/makaut_buddy/pull/174

All my PRs were reviewed by the Hacktoberfest organization and were finally accepted.

In this way, I completed my Hacktoberfest 2024.

Lessons I learnt

Now here’s the summary of the lessons I learnt from my whole Hacktoberfest experience.

Before contributing to any project make sure that you have read the contributing guidelines.
Make sure you start working on the issue after getting assigned.(This is followed in most of the repositories).
Be patient while working on any issue and be collaborative.