Getting Started

Honestly, Speaking When I was registering for Hacktoberfest, I had nothing planned, or you can say I don’t have that kind of intuition to be the Hacktoberfest this year, but one day after registering for Hacktoberfest, I have in my mind that maybe something is going to happen. I was not very sure about what I was actually doing or if I was able to do it or not. I just gave myself a chance to let’s do it and explore things all along the way.

Finding Projects

After registering for Hacktoberfest, I was not very curious and excited. So after 3-4 days when Hacktoberfest Officially started, I just started looking for any repo where I can contribute, even small changes that I can do Then I don’t know how I filter things because I was not doing very intentionally, but one project came up where Hacktoberfest label was added 22 minutes ago and no one was there at that time to say assign me and I was the first one to reach out to that repo Maybe then I started reading what maintainer was suggesting is necessary for contributing and when I tap on the issues link which was suggested by the maintainer, there are 50 issue out there, from small to big, and suddenly a surge was going inside my head and saw there are few small things all there which I can understand so I decided to type assign me and after typing assign me, I got to know issues are not assigning anyone if you wanted to do or fix something, then do it and create a PR frankly speaking, I don’t know what this project is all about, what it is out there or what is fixing in the market Even at the time when I am writing this to you, I don’t know why and what things that project was fixing. I just read all the documentation, which is completely beginner-friendly. That’s why I can understand things and made some minor changes, and that’s how it all started.

Making My First Contribution

I started fork that repository, and after cloning in my local machine, I started reading code suggestions that were provided by sonarcloud I don’t know actually what it is or how it works, but this platform was suggesting all those 50 issues that were there in AsyncAPI Generator repository and also suggested potential resolutions that contributors can do easily when they read those suggestions and things.

Learning and Growth

You will get to know after reading this how much new I am to the open source contribution what actually I did is I made few changes in the master branch of the fork repository and raise a pull request and after raising that PR I created another branches of that fork repository and when I started creating my 2nd and 3rd PR I saw the changes that I made in the master branch was also added with that 2nd and 3rd PR which I don’t wanted to mention that how I started and after 3-4 days of continously working I get to know it is a great convention to create a seperate branch of every changes that we made and I also learned how to add only specific changes that we wanted to mention and changes that we don’t wanted to push.

Key Learnings

• What is the difference between git adds? Vs git add -p <filename where changes made>.

• Why it is a good convention to not make changes in the master branch and create a separate branch for every different issue you are solving.

• I learnt how to use git beyond what I learnt from watching tutorials.

Community Engagement

I must say that the reviewers and maintainers of that repo were very welcoming for every new contributor, which I really loved about, and I saw I stuck in many places, and they will help me out by navigating what I have to do after any step to make it a more quality contribution to that thing, whatever I am contributing at that time.

Reflecting on Challenges

Well, I spent a complete 2 week on this repository for contributing on it and I had face too many challenges but this one is biggest challenges you can say I overcome whenever I create any new branch and push changes the changes that I made inside my master branch will automatically added in every PR that I created which created a chaos inside my head you know the feeling when if you are not assigned for any issue and no one knows in which second another person raised a PR on which issue you are working right now which is a drastic situation for me so did too many things seek help with chatgpt and claude but now able to fix it after 4-5 days I deleted my every PR and then do the whole things from starting.

Celebrating Success

Well, I am very happy today because for Hacktoberfest we have to create 4 quality PRs that were merged, and after 7 days of review from Hacktoberfest they announced officially that you won or not, but I raised 6 PRs and 4 are already merged. I know it was not any big deal, but it was actually a very good start for every newcomer to motivate them that they can also do something next level 😉.

Looking Ahead

Well, you guys might be thinking what next and I was very clear about it and I wanted to do a Job and also try to explore other open source oppurnities as well so wish me good luck and thank you for reading and if you learn something from it let me know in the comment below 👇