Hacktoberfest: Status as of Oct 31st
I started off strong with pacdiv and the regex.guide app, which I'm proud to say still includes my reset button. I plan to contribute more to pacdiv's app in the future as I really enjoyed the experience and I liked using Gatsby.
Emojipages continues to expand, however it seems like my pull request was left in the dust. It is well behind the current version. I thought the repo owner Brittany was taking her time to read and review the code, but it turns out she just ignored it completely. I plan to update it to the current version, and try to resubmit, but I'm afraid that I just don't have time to do it before Oct. 31st. So I plan to work on it in my own time next month, or possibly for Release 0.3.
PlexisJs has updated and not included my code, I am updating my pull request as I type this in the hopes that it is accepted soon. It may be too late for Hacktoberfest, but I really want this to go through as I really liked the community.
On a brighter note, my last pull request to OpenClimateFix was reviewed and merged by the maintainer FWirtz.
PlexisJs has updated and not included my code, I am updating my pull request as I type this in the hopes that it is accepted soon. It may be too late for Hacktoberfest, but I really want this to go through as I really liked the community.
On a brighter note, my last pull request to OpenClimateFix was reviewed and merged by the maintainer FWirtz.
My Experience
This month was like a roller-coaster, and one of the most difficult I have ever had in school. I had a LOT to do this month, and Hacktoberfest was by far the nicest part of the month for me. I had a lot of assignments, midterms, tests, and pull requests to make this month, and I barely got it all done. My study week was spent researching, writing, and fixing code, and virtually nothing else. It was a terribly difficult month for me. The silver lining was Hacktoberfest in the end.
I got to see all of the amazing projects my peers worked on, and I even got to work on some of those projects myself. I searched through hundreds of interesting projects and communities, and found many projects I wanted to be a part of, but was too inexperienced in the material or lacked the time to get involved in. The projects that I ended up working on were all great projects with amazing goals like researching climate change using open source technology, teaching Javascript programming through a library that anyone has access to, and making regular expressions easier to make and more accessible to new programmers. I also participated in making a game, something I've always wanted to do, and even though it was a simple quiz game I learned a lot about Javascript while working on it.
Goals
I set four goals at the beginning of Hacktoberfest, two of which I now realize were a little too ambitious for different reasons, and two of which I achieved multiple times this month. The goals are:
- To work on a product that I use frequently, and have my pull request confirmed and accepted to the project.
- To learn more about databases in a project that I work on, as I am very interested in database design.
- To contribute to a project that involves UI design, which I love to work on.
- To ask for help from my community and the online community as well.
For my first goal, I failed because it turns out that the projects I had in mind (GIMP, Musescore, and StarUML) were all either not on Github anymore, never have been, or are almost dead entirely. I looked for others but it turns out I don't use that many open source programs, and I couldn't find issues in other projects that I had any notion of how to find or fix.
I failed my second goal because it was extremely difficult to find any projects that used databases on Github, in any language that I knew. I eventually found one but it was too large for me to finish this month, and is one of the possible issues I might work on for Release 0.3.
My last 2 goals I succeeded in many times. Almost all of my projects involved UI design, and it solidified my resolve to become a web developer, as I was unsure before of what field I was most interested in. The last one of my goals turned out to be the most important one of all, the thing I needed to learn most was to ask for help more often. Every time I asked for help, my big issues became small quirks that fixed themselves. I was nervous at first to ask for help, preferring to do things my own way, and now I am more eager to ask for help than ever before.