My Journey in Hacktoberfest -2022
General Information.
What is Hacktoberfest ?
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source software by DigitalOcean that encourages participation in giving back to the open-source community. Developers get involved by completing pull requests, participating in events, and donating to open source projects.
How to participate in Hacktoberfest ?
Inorder to participate in this contest, you must register in this using it's official website between September 26, 2022 and October 31, 2022. After registering, you must link your github account from where you will contribute. You have to submit atleast 4 PR's (Pull Requests) to a valid project/repository which is linked with hacktoberfest. These PR's should not be a spam as the project/repository owner must check it before merging. After the PR's are merged, hacktoberfest takes a time duration of 7 days from before showing the count on your profile. In those 7 days, hacktoberfest checks whether the PR's follow the required guidelines. If the PR is valid, hacktoberfest will increase the count of accepted PR's on your profile, thus giving you a holopin badge.
Once all the pull requests have been accepted, you will get a link for swags.
My Journey.
Discovering Hacktoberfest.
It was 7th October, 2022, I was scrolling my Linkedin feed when I came across a post regarding hactoberfest. First I thought it was something related to 'hacking', beacuse the name says 'hack'-toberfest. After that I surfed internet and gathered information about this contest. Then I found that it involves 'open source contribution', a term that fantasizes me a lot. I not only registered, but also referred it to fellow contributors.
Open source connects people all around the world.
Finding the right Project.
Next step to Hactoberfest contest is finding the right project to contribute to. For a valid hactoberfest project, the repository should be labled with #hacktoberfest or #hacktoberfest2022.
Since my interest was in Data Structures and Algorithms, I found some repositories with suitable lables to contribute to.
Contribution Starts.
After searching for projects, next task was to find suitable issues to contribute it. Going through the project one must understand it carefully and contribute effectively. All my PR's were attached with a message which says to accept the PR for hacktoberfest.
The worst part about contributing was that some repositories were fake and invalid and even after contributing, hacktoberfest discards the contribution.
Sometimes my repositories were discarded during the period of 7 days. It was a very frustrating period, but I was also enjoying it at same time as it was an amazing experience to find new opportunities.
There were times when the project maintainer itself assigned an issue to me, which helped me to sense a feeling of responsibility toward the project. It further helped to improve my contributions.
The projects in which I contributed were:
Journey as a Project Maintainer.
Hactoberfest also allows you to be a contributor as well as a project maintainer at same time. You have follow some guidelines while maintaining a project. I made a public repository of Data Structures and Algorithms and labled it with #hacktoberfest and #hacktoberfest2022.
There were more than 100 PR's in my repository. Since I was not so sure about how to maintain a repository, this experience was very delightful and gave me confidence.
I tried to go through most of the PR's to ensure that that it was not a spam or duplicate.
If a duplicate PR was merged, then the hactoberfest would mark my repository as invalid.
All the merged PR's were labled with hacktoberfest-accepted lable.
Overall Experience.
Overall, Hactoberfest 2022 was a great experience. It was like a roller-coaster ride for me, I had many ups and downs during this contest.
I had 5 out of 10 PRs that were accepted. Rest of them were rejected because the projects were fake, or there were too many spam PR's in that repository. During my contribution period, I had access to get mentored and meet amazing people in this field. Most of them were seniors who helped a lot and gave a good guidance regarding the open source journey.
As a project maintainer, a had privilege to go through various codes and understand various people's thought process while solving a particular problem. Also, I got chance to mentor various people and share my knowledge with others.
Hacktoberfest Result.
I got 4 holopin digital badges after my all 4 PR's got accepted. Other than this, I had got a DEV BADGE and a SWAG PACK.
git commit -m "Happy Hacktoberfest Everyone!"
