My First Hacktoberfest Entry

There I was, afraid to swim. Sitting on the edge of the vast ocean that is Hacktoberfest, I gathered my courage and dipped my toes.

What can I say, the thought of having somebody reject your hours of work is scary. Yet, everyday thousands of people make the choice to contribute — I guess the feeling of contributing to something great outweighs all the fear. As for me, I was curious as to how the process actually worked. Here is how my first dive into the world of open source development went.

It all started with a search. I would argue that this is one of the harder parts for a first timer like me. You see, there are many issues open out there on GitHub, but truthfully there are only a select few that I am confident in taking on. I started with something easy, updating a README.md file for this Discord bot. I put everything I knew about Python and Github to the test: I forked his repo and followed his vague instructions to try and get the bot working on my own private Discord server. Already, I knew where I would start when I would begin to update his readme, and that would be the grammar and spelling. After getting it working through a bit of trial and error, I went on to start installing some plugins to make editing his readme a little easier. Once those were downloaded, I went to work proofreading everything. Just some minor edits here and there and I made my first commit. Though, there was still more to be done. I went ahead and added links to some of the stuff he had already mentioned (e.g. he mentioned to go to Discord’s developer website but provided no link). Second I went ahead to create a new category mentioning the perquisites since his repo was essentially assuming that the user had his computer already prepared. In this new category I added steps on how to use Git to clone and the links to the necessary programs to install. I felt that I added all the necessary additions and chose to submit a pull request to see what he thought about it; sure enough he approved and it went through. Bada bing bada boom.

So, what did I learn from all of this? Well, it really isn't all that scary. I honestly thought that he might’ve told me that it wasn’t what he was looking for and reject the changes, but lo and behold it went off without a hitch. That being said, I feel that I am ready to take on a more ambitious issue — which is what I will be planning for my next entry into this year’s Hacktoberfest.