Hacktoberfest 2018 — My foray into the World of Open Source
About Hacktoberfest
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio. It is open to everyone in their global community! Five quality pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories between October 1 and October 31 after signing up on the Hacktoberfest website. The first 50,000 people to complete the challenge earn a limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt.
My activity
It all started with a message in a Whatsapp programming group that read, “Submit 5 PRs in the month of October and get a Hacktoberfest T-shirt.” The thing that instantly attracted me to it was not my love for coding but as you must have guessed it, it was the T-shirt that I would receive. My mid-semester recess had just begun on Oct 13 and would go on till Oct 21. I had ample time and wanted to explore Open Source. There couldn’t have been a better platform than Hacktoberfest to do so.
I immediately signed up on the website and made myself familiar with the Participation Details and Rules. The main barrier then was to learn the scary Git overflow, the only thing that stops people from delving into Open Source. I read up on the steps to open a Pull Request and opened my first ever Pull Request.
The feeling when it got merged was just exhilarating 🎉! My Open Source journey had just begun.
During my endeavour to open 5 PRs for Hacktoberfest, I discovered other organisations such as Microsoft + Open Source, openebs, OpenBazaar, Auth0, GatsbyJS and many more that were handing out swags for contributions to their repositories. What started as a humble approach to open 5 PRs soon turned into a passion for Open Source. Over the course of Hacktoberfest, I opened 26 other pull requests in 25 repositories. My commits basically included fixing typos, refactoring Python code in accordance with the PEP8 style guide, fixing broken links, etc.
Here are links to some of my PRs:
and many more…
Swags 👕 🎁 ❤️
I eventually received most of the swags for my contributions. Some are still pending, so stay tuned for updates. I will add more images as and when I receive the remaining t-shirts.
Wrapping Up
Hacktoberfest 2018 was quite an eventful and a mind-opening experience for me. I learned a lot about the Git workflow, the correct way to open issues, submit PRs, write commit messages, etc. Several people including me have started their Open Source journey because of Hacktoberfest. I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who made it possible. Kudos to DigitalOcean, GitHub and Twilio for organising this event.
Keep contributing to Open Source. Adios!
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