My First Participation in Hacktoberfest (2021)

👋 Introduction

Hi there, My name is Ajay. I am currently a Higher Secondary School 🏫 student, studying at Bangalore. I like to code 👨‍💻. I primarily use Python as my language of preference to code. Occasionally, I help others in their projects and I quickly adjust to their code style. I am a quick and adaptive learner. 😎

In this blog I would like to Enthusiastically share my experience about my First Hacktoberfest. 🤩

🎃 About Hacktoberfest

• Hacktoberfest is a month-long 🗓️ event in October, run by Digital Ocean partnered with GitHub and other companies to support the philosophy of Open Source Software.
• Anyone can take part and participate in Hacktoberfest.
• The requirement for completing the event is to be one among the first 50 thousand 🧠 people to successfully make 4 valid Pull Requests, to any repository(s) hosted in GitHub or Gitlab.
• This year for successfully completing the event you get a Limited Edition T-Shirt, and a Developer Badge. 💸

Enough about Hacktoberfest, let me share my experience in my First Hacktoberfest. 😅

🥳 My Experience

When I first noticed hacktoberfest at the time I was unaware of what is Open Source and how much impact they had on technology 🤔, also at that time, I wasn’t much experienced as a coder and was new to Version Control and GitHub. 😣

But now things have changed 😎, I have worked on many Projects and I am well versed with how GitHub works.

During this event, I had fun contributing to many projects. I was also appreciated by my family and my friends 😊. But even after preparing myself for this event, I was still a bit hesitant at the start 😓.

Initially all the repositories seemed way out of my league, but as they say "Don't judge a book by its cover", when I had a look into the issues and the code, they weren’t actually tough as they seemed 😆. After finishing my 4 PR’s, I didn’t stop there, I contributed to a few more and I will continue to do so.

Although majority of my contribution were “code related” there were also a few in the other category, like fixing typos 😉.

So what advice I have for first timers like me is that, “Contribution” towards an Open Source Software does not involve only writing code, implementing new features, finding bugs 🪲, writing tests…, but it can also be something very simple such as fixing grammatical errors, writing blogs 📝 about the product, helping in translation and promoting the product.

Now since I understand more about open source, I will still continue to contribute to Open Source Software regardless whether the event stops or continues. 🤘

👏 Final Words

I give my thanks to all the companies that hosted this event. I had a lot of fun and learnt new stuff 😀 during this event. I am very much looking forward to this event in the upcoming years.

And lastly, I really appreciate all the people who took their time to read my entire blog 🙏.