This is the first time I have heard about hacktoberfest and I have also joined hacktoberfest.

Just look at my contributions spike in October month.

The first time I contributed to open source is during hacktoberfest 2022. If you don't know about hacktoberfest then it is a global event where developers across the world, no matter if they are experienced or just starting out contribute to open-source projects via code or no code. And every year, it is conducted by the digital ocean.

I started out with some open-source projects. I remember I opened my first-ever pull request in a repository that wasn't super popular. It was a weather app. And the thing I did over there was, I changed the default city of the app and made it display the weather about that city.

And there was another project, I think it was something called 'TextUtils'. It was a web application made in react that featured all of the operations we can perform with text inside of a browser. For example:

• Copying text on the clipboard

• Pasting text from the clipboard

• Changing the case of the string

• Using speech recognition to take input

• Text to speech

I actually added a paste from the clipboard button there. Yes, it worked. And when I opened it up on firefox, the app crashed and I opened up the console, I found an error.

And that right there I opened up the first issue. I opened up the pull request with the paste button implemented and went to sleep. The next day I found out the maintainer of the repository wanted to solve the bug and she asked if I can solve the bug. I agreed and I was assigned the bug. I tried hard to fix it only to realize that SpeechRecognition isn't supported in Firefox. Then I just remove the feature on firefox. And yes the bug was fixed.

That right there, I completed my first, second, third, and fourth pull requests. And I got this badge:

And after a week of verification. I got holopin badges. Yes, I want to show you them here:

Ans in tweet 😅

After that, I continued contributing to some more projects and started opening up issues in the open-source projects that I actually use like material UI.

Achievement

I didn't get a T-shirt. The thing is I wanted to have a T-shirt this year and I wanted to plant some trees the next year, yes I will take part again. But the T-shirts were finished as my final pull request was verified on 1st November.

Anyways, it feels great thinking I lifted up 120kg CO2 from the atmosphere.

Conclusion

This was my first hacktoberfest but this will not be my last. I learned more about the open-source community and how spam projects exist. I know I didn't contribute to some real-world projects this year but will be doing surely next year.

Thank you for your time :).