Table of contents

• What is Hacktoberfest?

• How I searched for issues?

• My mistakes and learnings

• Don’t

• Failures

It was my first time participating in Open Source. I have done new mistakes, corrected a few approaches. Here in this article I will tell my experience from scratch.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event in October that encourages Open Source contributors and developers worldwide to give back to the global tech community. It’s a fantastic opportunity for the contributors to showcase their skills and get to know about other Open Source communities.

In this event, we need to get our 4 pull requests merged in Hacktoberfest accepted repos. After that, it usually take 7 more days to make it count as a contribution. How to find repos/issues? Everything is written in their website. If you still have questions, feel free to ask below.

How I searched for issues?

I joined the webinar they had after initiating my github in their website so that my PRs get tracked. There I came to know about https://goodfirstissues.com/ . This is a treasure for beginners. There is a section where you can search for the Hacktoberfest labeled issues with your stack.

This will show the issues based on your inputs. I did the same and went to see the issues one by one.

But I was disappointed to see that all the listed issues are already assigned. I was thinking to wait for new issues. Suddenly I thought about going through each repo to see if they have other issues which is not listed but accepted in Hacktobest. I contributed mostly to these repos:

1. Codse/Animata (3 accepted PRs)

2. ZTM (1 accepted PR)

My mistakes and learnings

1. My first contribution was in ZTM where I had to do animations without JS. Check here

   Here the workflow and setup was not too complicated.

   Clone → Change → Push → Create PR

2. My second contribution was a bit challenging. I had to setup locally. The main thing you need to know is how to setup and run the project locally. Always search for files like contributions.md or contributing.md or readme.md where the procedure is given. I followed the steps and set it up. I had to work with storybook which I had never heard of before. So I just followed their guide to create new components. Did the required changes and pushed. But I did not notice that I was not pushing to my fork and to their main repo instead. So I learned about a new git command.

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     git remote set-url origin <my_fork_url>
   

3. In this I made a huge mistake. In fear of not getting repo to get assigned, I got myself assigned 2 issues at once.

   I followed the steps, did the change, raised the first PR. Before this PR got merged, I hurried and solved another issue and then tried to create another pull request. But but but.. I noticed that all the commits of the second solution is referencing the first PR. I was in panic for a moment.

   Then I got to know that we can also delete commits permanently. Here we go, new git command added to my list.

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     git reset --hard <commit_hash>
     git push --force origin main.
   

   Each commits has an unique hash.

   

   So to delete a commit, we need to provide the hash of that commit after what we want to delete the commits. For example,

   If my commits are hashed as b2, b3, b4 and I want to delete b4 commit, I need to provide the hash b3. So I deleted the commits and pushed to the fork as it reached to the normal state of solving and referencing only one issue.

4. My 4th issue was boggling my head a bit. I solved it but I was not sure that my code is a ready to push or not. And as per the guidelines, I only can create one PR in one issue. So I asked the maintainer about the code. He was very polite and humble to suggest me to raise the PR and he will tell after reviewing if I need any change or not. I raise the PR and within 3-4 days, my 4th PR got merged and I received this message from Hacktoberfest

   

Don’t

One more mistake we as a beginner usually do it asking the maintainer to review our PR too frequently. They are also busy. So wait for 3-4 days to get the response and after 3-4 days if you do not receive any update regarding your PR, you can simply ask in the discord tagging the maintainer or any other communication channel the org have.

Failures

I got my assigned 2 good issues with totally unknown stack. One was Kotlin in backend with TypeScript and another one was Rust. I failed to solve those. And another one documentation issue I solved that did not get merged. I am a bit disappointed thinking and I could have solved the issue if I would have stick with it longer. But I lost the motivation. This was between my 3rd and 4th PR getting merged.

This was my first time experience to contributing in Hacktoberfest’24 event. It was a great learning.