First Hacktoberfest Complete!

This year I had a goal to finally complete Hacktoberfest, which is an online hackathon where you contribute to open source projects.

In the beginning of October, I reached out to my various discord coding communities for some project contribution ideas and was able to complete 4 small pull requests! The simple projects I did were:

• Added an accessibility category (first PR) and extra app links (second PR) to a couple of sections on webgems.io
• Added a haiku
• Added a pixel to Twilios open pixel art project

What Ive learned from this experience is that its not about how big a contribution I made to a project, but what I learned in doing so.

I made an error with my very first pull request on the Twilio project, where I swapped the branch to do the PR then fixed it. I also learned that I needed to make a dev branch and then do the PR on the dev branch so that the maintainer of the project can merge to master as they choose.

I found instructions on how to do the pull requests via Github of course.

Then later found out how to *update* the fork I have to complete the PR later on Thank you Christina Solana:

1. Clone your fork: git clone [email protected]:YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-FORKED-REPO.git
2. Add remote from original repository in your forked repository: cd into/cloned/fork-repo git remote add upstream git://github.com/ORIGINAL-DEV-USERNAME/REPO-YOU-FORKED-FROM.git git fetch upstream
3. Updating your fork from original repo to keep up with their changes: git pull upstream master

Sweet, sweet swag!

Ever since the web 2.0 days, I was a supporter of open source software and now that Im coding more, I want to write my own project to share with the world and contribute more to open source projects. Stay tuned to see what I think up! I also want to do more hackathons; both online and in person. I completed a couple of them last year which were a lot of fun!

Happy coding!