Skip to main content

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. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Release 0.4 - My External Pull Request to Uber

Continuing from my previous post , I will now be covering my external contribution for Release 0.4. This external pull request is my biggest and most challenging one to date. The challenge came from size of the project, as searching and navigating through it's code base felt like somewhat of a rats maze to find where the issue lies. I also had minimal experience in React (one small school project), so the unfamiliarity with the language and architecture presented some challenges as well. The Project -  Uber - Base Web In short, Base Web is Uber's web based design system comprised of "modern, responsive, living components" implemented in ReactJS. This project contains a vast variety of functional web components that can be used by web developers the front-end of their web projects. As someone who has done freelance web development in the past, I've always appreciated the availability of open source libraries, especially the more complex one's such as this ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lab 8 - Contribution Goals for CDOT Telescope & LifeStyle E-Commerce

After successfully completing Hacktoberfest, we move onto bigger and better challenges in open source. By November 15th I have the following goals to complete: 1. Contribute to a bigger issue on an open-source project (no more "good-first-issue" tags). 2. Contribute to CDOT Telescope, an internal project built by my fellow classmates. In this post I will break down my issue and goal for each goal. External Project- LifeStyle E-Commerce  This is a project I found in hacktoberfest and fixed a styling alignment bug for. You can find the full details of my contribution in my previous post.   If you are already familiar wit the project, you can skip the overview section. Overview Lifestyle E-ommerce is a front-end project for building an online store. It supplies various well designed pages for front-end developers to customize and utilize as a starting point for their e-commerce projects, whether it be for themselves or their clients. I gravitated towards this ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Building Native Mobile Apps with React-Native

What is React-Native? React-Native is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Facebook, the same organizations who created the robust ReactJS library which one of the top front-end web development frameworks. React-Native is written in JavaScript which makes it inviting for any web developers looking into mobile application development. It is also syntactically similar to ReactJS making it a great option for web developers transitioning to mobile application development since it would mitigate the learning curve associated. React-Native is also based in on the component oriented architecture that all modern web development frameworks such as Angular, VueJs, and ReactJS employ, which also minimizes the learning curve. Aside from having an inviting premise for web developers, one of the biggest benefits it offers is the ability to develop native mobile applications for multiple platforms (iOS and Android) with a single code base. This makes it a highly...
Post a Comment
Read more