To recap, for the month of October, our class participated in Hacktoberfest. This was my absolute first time contributing in open-source projects.
Admittedly, I was extremely nervous and stressed going into this month. I had no idea what to expect in terms of project difficulty, how responsive repo maintainers are, and what the open-source community is like.
To be honest, it also took me quite a long time to find issues/ projects that I found interesting. I was scouring the recommended sites such as Awesome for Beginners, and Up for Grabs, and also just going through Repos/ Issues marked with the "Hacktoberfest" label.
Eventually, for my first Issue, I came across the Video Hub App repo. Where I was able to work with technologies such as TypeScript and Electron, which I knew very little about. It took a little while, but I was able to successfully complete a feature that allowed users to filter out specific folders. This was a great experience because I was able to see how professional projects are organized, and the maintainer was very responsive.
After this I really hit the ball rolling and was able to find more issues to work on. One thing that I enjoyed was that all of my PRs were drastically different from each other. I worked on correcting documentation for AdonisJS, fixed a HTTP Content-Type Header bug in tiny-http, and then finally even created a short script for users to load up their own local version of the Electron documentation site.
I think I can confidently say I learned more about open source and Git/ Github in the last month, than I have in the past 16 months that I have spent in this program. Creating branches for issues, submitting pull requests, merging, and rebasing branches were all very new to me, and I am so happy that I enrolled in this course before I graduated!
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