Hacktoberfest – Recap

This is it, my final Hacktoberfest blog. If you haven’t been following my journey this month, I was given the task to complete four pull requests and start contributing to real world repositories. It was quite the experience and I learned a lot this month.

I wanted to do something relatively easy for my first PR, so I looked through the GitHub issues for a “good first issue”. I found one posted to add a disabled tag to an application registered with Electron to clean out applications that are no longer using Electron. It was a pretty easy task, but I did have an issue with the commit message. I didn’t realize that they had a format for commit messages and I tried to manually change the commit message from the GitHub website. This was before I knew about commit –amend.

For my second PR, I wanted something a little more involved and originally found an issue to write some documentation for. It would of had me run the application in order to show the output but it turned out I needed an Apple app called Healthkit. I have never owned an Apple product so I had to scramble to find another issue. I was able to find an issue to disable a submit button after being clicked in order to prevent multiple requests being sent to the server.

My third PR was a big step up from the previous two. I was assigned this issue back at the beginning of the month and spent some time each week getting to know the code and reading the documentation for the supporting API. It was a close call, but I was able to submit the PR by the end of the third week.

Since I had spent so much time getting to know FreeTube from the last PR, I decided to stick with it for my fourth PR. I already had a good idea on how the code worked but this time I had to learn more about Vue.js, templates, and how the document object works.

Overall I enjoyed having to do this. Hacktoberfest has allowed me to dip my toes into the world of contributing. It was pretty intimidating at first, and importer syndrome is defiantly a thing, but I feel like I had a good progression in difficulty throughout the month. One of the best things to come of this however was not even directly related to writing code. I am much more confident in using GitHub now. I used to rely on the Git GUI to try and sort out my issues but I am now comfortable using Git Bash to do all of my Git work.