Hacktoberfest: My entrance to the 'Real' World of Open Source Development

DPS909, Hacktoberfest, and Release 0.2

Today I began to look at real issues and projects on Github. I've graduated from contributing to my peers' code, and have completed the first major project of four to be completed by the end of my course. Release 0.1 is complete, an assignment I talked about in my previous post. For the next assignment, I will have to attempt to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge. In order to win a Hacktoberfest T-Shirt, I have to find 4 issues and submit 4 pull requests on professional projects on Github. Part of the assignment is to blog my findings, so that is what I will be doing for the month of October.

My goals for Hacktoberfest

1. To work on a product that I use frequently, and have my pull request confirmed and accepted to the project.
2. To learn more about databases in a project that I work on, as I am very interested in database design.
3. To contribute to a project that involves UI design, which I love to work on.
4. To ask for help from my community and the online community as well.

So why am I attempting these goals? I want to engage in the community more, for a start. I keep to myself most of the time, and I have issues asking for help. It's one of the main problems I have in day-to-day life. I think this is a good opportunity to learn and grow in that respect. In terms of technical skill, I am fascinated by databases and their structure, and I want to learn more about them. I'm not sure what kind I'm going to find, but I'm excited at the prospect of contributing. Finally, my main goal is to contribute to a project that I use regularly. I am a frequent user of open source projects, but I never stopped to think how they were developed and why they are open source until now. I am hopeful that I can contribute to something I have used for so long.

Possible Issues

These are the issues that I am interested in attempting, for various reasons:

• https://github.com/brittanyrw/emojipages/issues/36
• https://github.com/AgileVentures/sfn-client/issues/401

These two issues are good examples of easy entry code for me to try. I'm planning on finding something bigger to work on and having a few smaller issues going like these ones. Both of these issues are part of projects that are very interesting to me and are UI issues. To prepare myself to work on these I will brush up on my css, html, and javascript knowledge by reviewing my notes from previous years, and studying the styling of these projects in order to match colors, shapes, and sizes.

• https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/WebODM/issues/689'

This project provides a way for me to combine my database and UI interests, in a feature that seems interesting to me. It involves creating a camera database to pull camera data from, in an effort to ease the processing of aerial imagery from drones. I could implement a database, and add a dropdown menu. In order to accomplish this, I must investigate the current database usage and features, how to implement such a database, and study the project's organizational structure and UI constraints.