Hacktoberfest - My First of Many Open Source Events

After establishing a basic foundation in open-source concepts and skills, I eagerly look forward to participating in Hacktoberfest this upcoming October, and hopefully many more to come. Hacktoberfest is hosted by Digital Ocean and it is a month long event that runs throughout the month of October and encourages contributions to a variety of projects. It is highly accessible and welcoming to individuals across all regions and skill levels globally, which is great news since I still consider myself a beginner as an open-source developer. On top of all this, they also offer the prize of a Hacktoberfest shirt for registered users that successfully complete 4 or more pull requests. After reading through all the information on the Hacktoberfest website, I proceeded to set two goals and find three issues I would like to tackle.

Here are the goals I set for this event:

1 .Get involved in a project that you find interesting

As a student, its often difficult to pursue personal project or learn new technologies based on personal interest with the academic workload. Hackroberfest solves this problem by allowing me to get involved in projects I find interesting and learn more about them while remaining academically productive for my open-source course. 

2. Learn more about how to use git

Even though I've established a very basic competency so far, I still consider myself a novice when it comes to Git skills and proficiency. However I do believe Git skills are instrumental in succeeding  as an open-source developer, so I will definitely focus on learning more and improving in this area. 

I will measure my progress subjectively by checking in every week on how I feel I am progressing towards these goals, and making adjustments if I am not progressing as desired. 

These are three issues I plan to work on:

1. Move docs files into their own folder

I chose this as my first issue to tackle, because I wanted to ease myself into the flow of contributing with a simpler task. This will help me sharpen my git skills because it involves modifying the file tree in the repository.

2. Add 'search by' field to input 

I chose this issue because it is for a ReactJS app, and I am interested in improving my ReactJS competency. I currently have a very basic background in React and hope to learn new things by solving this issue and reading other developers approaches to building features.

3. Improve documentation add new sections for better explanation

I chose this issue because technical writing is a skill I highly value and improving the clarity and detail in documentation will be a great challenge and opportunity to improve my technical writing which I believe will be an essential skill throughout my career. 

With Hacktoberfest being only a few days away, I am eager to begin working towards these goals and emerging as a superior open-source developer by the end of October.