Skip to main content

DPS 909 - Lab 3 - Hacktoberfest, and the Very Scary Repository

It's that time of year; the mornings are getting chilly, the leaves are turning, the pumpkin spice is flowing, and open source developers are getting all worked up over something called Hacktoberfest. Not to be confused with the other, similar-sounding (though arguably no less beer-filled) celebration, Hacktoberfest is a chance for open source enthusiast to truly flex their projects and contributions. Hosted by DigitalOcean, Hacktoberfest 2019 is an event running throughout the month of October that encourages activity in the open source community. It is completely free to sign up, and participants can even link their Github accounts to use as their Hacktoberfest profiles. As you may have already guessed, I will be participating in this event as my next major milestone on my journey into the world of open source.

Through the miracle of APIs, even my profile picture was imported!
While the prospect of diving headfirst into such a large, open source event as a beginner may sound daunting, don't be afraid! There are no ghosts or ghouls lurking in the depths of the open source world (though there is an ample amount of bugs and dead repos). In fact, Hacktoberfest very much encourages open source newbies to participate - I should know, I am one myself! There are many resource for a beginner to get started, and the one that I am using is Up For Grabs. Up For Grabs is a small, clever web application that allows prospective contributors to search for high-profile Github projects using tags. Using their search, you can sort projects by labels (e.g. beginner, bite-sized, help-needed) and also tags (say, you only want to look for C# projects... no problem!). It is a very handy tool, and I've managed to narrow down a few issues that have grabbed my interest:
When attempting to make headway into any new ventures, it's important to set goals for yourself. My goals for Hacktoberfest, aside from wading ever-deeper into the open sea (heh), are as follows:
  1. Contribute to something I'm confident in, because it's important to start strong!
  2. Contribute to something that uses technology I want to improve in, because the goal is always to keeping learning!
  3. Contribute to something that just seems like fun, because nobody is asking you to contribute, you have to want to do it!
With beginner-friendly resources in hand and the above goals in mind, I'm all set to get hacking. Can't wait to get started!

(Protip: It totally helps productivity to code while wearing a costume.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 3

I'll admit it right off: this week, I did not have a lot of time to spare for Hacktoberfest, so I was unable to tackle a new goal (out of the ones I set for myself at the start of the month). Nevertheless, I did not want to jank up the weekly momentum I had by missing a contribution, so I simply opted for a simple one instead. I found a nice project , by GitHub user vichitr , that focused on encouraging amateur contributors during Hacktoberfest, not unlike the last repo I contributed to. Instead of focusing on design patterns, vichitr's project contains a variety of issues that programmers are invited to tackle. I decided to contribute to issue #6 on the repo, which is to implement a data structure in the language of your choice. Since I was short on time for the week, I decided to contribute a threaded tree by overhauling a previous project I did as a school assignment. A threaded tree is a binary search tree that supports easy, in-order traversal of its values. Normally,
Post a Comment
Read more

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 1

As mentioned in my last blog post , I am currently in the midst of participating in Hacktoberfest in order to deepen my understanding of open source. For my first week, I decided to start with a simple issue that I could confidently contribute to: the HackSta account's issue #12 . This issue invites other Github users to contribute customized icons for the Atom text editor (a product of Github!). It was very easy to start - users simply have to fork the repo and contribute new designs for the Atom logo in SVG format. The project has had many contributions in the past, and already has a large collection of over 500 icons, so there was lots of materials and references to work off of. The entire collection of custom Atom icons can be found on the project's website . There are entire collections of interesting variations on the default Atom logo, including palettes pulled directly from the color values of country flags and famous sports team logos. Take your pi
Post a Comment
Read more