Contributing to the Open-Source
How to contribute to the open-source or how can you give a hand to the community? These questions were constantly running through my head a while ago. Especially for a newbie, finding a solution to this may seem a bit troublesome. Actually, it’s not that hard. A little research, reading several articles written on this topic, and curiosity will be the most effective tool in solving this. Let’s look at the details.
I came across this term for the first time while reading the advice on learning web development. No matter how much I expanded my reading scale, I was always suggested to contribute to open-source in some way.
Before moving on to how to do it, I researched why it should be done and what benefits it could be. By contributing to the open-source project, I would have made the project better, offered new opportunities for free, and learned new things in this way, especially about this process.
I had notable commit experience on GitHub, but my pull request experience was almost non-existent. And that way I would have the opportunity to experience that too. First of all, I came across “How to Participate in Hacktoberfest — Even if You Don’t Write Code” by Seth Falco from freeCodeCamp during my daily reading. And it was the beginning of good things.
He was talking about Hacktoberfest and open-source. I had heard of Hacktoberfest before, but I didn’t know what their purpose was. Description from their website of what it is;
“Hacktoberfest, in its 8th year, is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean. During the month of October, we invite you to join open-source software enthusiasts, beginners, and the developer community by contributing to open-source projects.”
After reading the rules, conditions, process on the Hacktoberfest I decided to join this challenge. After I got home from work in the evening, I searched in detail for open-source projects that included the Hacktoberfest tag. Then I took the step to submit my first contribution to the free programming books, following the steps set by Seth Falco.
During this time, I got a lot of feedback like “revise it, fix it, it should be like this…”, etc. I didn’t expect it to happen like this. I was disappointed from time to time, and I spent a lot of time. However, after revising my pull request, again and again, I finally got the approval and added value to the community with my contribution.
There were many things that I needed to change and fix. However, it provided a good sense of satisfaction when I completed the job properly and handed it over according to the rules.
“What should be considered, which commands should be used, how to clone, fork, change and send a pull request…” I didn’t want to repeat them because Seth Falco explained them quite well in the article above. I published this to share my own experience and to encourage people to contribute to the community. I would recommend it to everyone.
