My Experience with Hacktoberfest

MY FIRST HACKTOBERFEST

I was not even a noob in the field of open-source before I was introduced with git and GitHub in the weekly meetup of our community. It was a hands-on session for the basic commands of git and we were given a brief description of the open-source community. By the end of the session, it was announced that next week’s agenda will be HACKTOBERFEST. I was quite excited to run git commands on my terminal because as lame as it may sound, but typing anything on the command line is still the second-best feeling for me, getting a pull request merged, remains the first. After being familiar with the basic commands and principles, I started reading blogs related to hacktoberfest and other open-source programs. At first, it appeared very difficult, things were not very clear and I was quite skeptical if I can pull this off. I am a decent programmer and I was very uncertain if I would be able to make even one sensible contribution. Then I consulted fellow community members and they gave me some meaningful insights and busted all the myths.

Communication, therefore, is the first and foremost important thing in this community.

Having clarified all my doubts, I registered for hacktoberfest. The website was cool and it had all the necessary information regarding the basic guidelines about the fest. There was even a dedicated section that listed beginner-friendly projects. I quickly went through the list and found some easy projects then and there only. I started working on the projects and finished them as quickly as I could. Having made four PRs, I was quite contented and satisfied but I never knew that it’s not as easy as it seems. In the greed of completing the challenge and claiming my t-shirt, I had made one useless PR and it was rejected as it was against the community standards. I was shattered but I didn’t give up this time. I began searching for some useful yet beginner-friendly projects. Finally, I completed the challenge and all of my PRs were accepted. The feeling was euphoric. I received a mail on 23rd October to claim my T-shirt and swags.

This part of my life, this little part is called happiness

To conclude, I would say that if you are preparing to dive in only for T-shirts or swags, I don’t think this will ever be a wise decision. Open-source as far as I have got to know is all about learning and teaching through community interaction. Even if you fail to complete the necessary challenges, you will learn a lot and that will remain with you forever.