Ay Yo! Welcome to my Blog!

This is my first ever blog post and it is a documentation of my experiences in contributing to open source projects for the very first time and my journey to getting my hand on the prestigeous Hacktoberfest T-shirt. During this journey, I will be sharing some secret tips that will help you kickstart your journey to open source contribution.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest(Hack+October+Fest) is a virtual festival event that is held in the month of October, in order to celebrate open source contributions. The main aim of this fest is to encourage developers to contribute to open source. Hacktoberfest 2020 was presented by Digital Ocean, Intel and DEV. The sponsors offer a prestegious T-shirt to everyone who completes the challenge. This year, the challenge was to contribute to any open source projects and open at least 4 Pull Requests(PRs) during the entire month of october. Up untill last year, you could easily submit shitty PRs and get that swag. But this year, some new rules were established to prevent this. Normally you could contribute to any project, but this year PRs could be made to participating public repos on GitHub i.e. those having the Hacktoberfest topic. Also, there was a cap on the number of people that would be eligible for the swag i.e. the first 70,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge. Feel free to check out the FAQ section for any doubts regarding new rules at : Link

The new rules affected contributions this year heavily. Lets look at some stats.

Users who registered for Hacktoberfest 2020*: 169,886 users
Users who completed and won Hacktoberfest*: 66,739 users
Eligible pull requests from all participants: 387,052 PRs
Participating repositories: 116,361 repos
Represented countries in participants: 203 countries
Day with the most PRs: 77,993 (20.15%) on October 1
Most used license**: MIT in 37,626 repositories (21.37%)
Top language: Python with 60,285 eligible PRs (15.58%)

Checkout the recap of Hacktoberfest 2020 at : Link

How I began my Journey

Before the month of september, I was completely unaware of Hacktoberfest. In fact, I came across it in late september. The first thing I did was visit their website where I stumbled upon the link to their discord channel. This was a game changer as I met several people from the open source community. To be frank, almost everyone was participating for their 3rd or 4th time. But the best part about this channel was that they were hosting an event called Preptember(Preparation+September) where they shared resources to help first timers start with their journey. I made my first contribution to first-contributions repository which gave me the confidence boost I needed to contribute to any repo I liked.

My Contributions

My first and toughest task was to find the perfect repository to make my actual first open source contribution. Firstly, not all repos have the Hactoberfest tag and secondly, those having the tag had a large number of PRs, making the merge process time consuming. I had to find a repo that was active enough as there was a time limit of 14 days to get the PR merged.

#PythonAlgorithms

Since this was my first year and the rules were strict, I decided to go with the safer option of choosing simpler places to contribute.So the first repo that I found was PythonAlgorithms. This repo was focussed on solvoing Leetcode python questions and maintain the best possible solution. It took a couple of days for me to find previously unsolved questions and contribute their solutions. Although the difficulty of content contributed was fairly simple, this repo had strict contribution rules and guidelines, and flooded with a huge amount of issues and PRs. I was overwhelmed but had to shoot my shot and in the end I was pretty comfortable with contributing to this repo and issued 2 PRs which ended up getting merged within a week.

PR: Link1 Link2

#Pybull

After making my first PR, I was not really sure if it would be merged hence I moved on to another repo related to some interesting applications. Pybull was the second repo to which I contributed. This repo focussed on simple applications using various python libraries like speech recognition, beautifulsoup, selenium, tkinter, pygame, opencv, pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn etc. I decided to learn about opencv and made two contributions. The first contribution I made here was a Face Recognition attendance System using Open CV. The second contribution was a Background Detector using video capture from opencv.

PR: Link1 Link2

Although these contributions were not to some major open source repositories, I believe they have set a good foundation for me to carry on my journey. I completed the challenge and got my SWAG. Checkout the unboxing on my youtube channel at Vineet Dhaimodker. Thats it for this Hacktoberfest, hope that my experience can be of some help for you to start your journey. And untill next blog,

Bye