My first Hacktoberfest!

Hello everyone!

Today, I am very happy and proud of myself, as I have created and got accepted my first pull request as part of the Hacktoberfest.

Hacktoberfest?

For people like me a month ago who have no idea what Hacktoberfest is, it is DigitalOcean's annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source through the month of October. It launched in 2013 and the previous year they had 140k+ participants (more stats here). Regarding the rules for contributors, all participants have until the end of October to submit and get approved at least 4 pull requests to any open source projects.

Issues hunt

Apparently, it takes a lot of time to find a proper issue, like A LOT, because there are so many participants from all over the world who constantly monitor GitHub and Gitlub for good easy issues to fix. It is competitive. So, the best chance is to find some issues that were not noticed by someone else yet is to look for newly created ones (better in bulk) in low activity times such as night or early morning. I also filtered using labels such as hacktoberfest, documentation or good first issue and key words like replace or typo for my first PR. Additionally, most of issues would come from fake repos that were created solely for useless PRs to easily pass Hacktoberfest, but I filtered those by reading README files and trying to prioritize the repos with some reputation (e.g. a few stars, good contributions' history).

VS Code Pets

So, I scrolled through some pages of resulted issues and found this one: Add a custom message for cat. I checked out the repo itself, vscode-pets, and the project looked really fun and cool to me. This extension allows you to have little window with cute pets with which you play or just watch while coding. I don't know but it brought me so much joy and I would personally love to have something like this as a VSCode user. My task was to come up with a customized welcoming message from a cat pet. It had to be something a cat might say. To be honest, I never had a cat, so I decided to research. I found this article, 7 sounds your cat makes and what they mean, which mentioned that Dr. Sasha Gibbons believed that "Trilling is a high-pitched, chirp-like noise made by cats as a greeting to people or other cats". Perfect, exactly what I needed! I also found out that "Meow!" is a second version of hello, so I decided to combine them into brrr... Meow!. Before, it was a plain says hello !. That was my change.

General steps

I checked for contributing instructions (CONTRIBUTING.md) but could not find any on the repo. I did not need it for my issue so I proceeded by forking a repo, creating a branch dedicated to the issue, making all of my updates inside that branch, pushing it back to my fork and submitting a pull request.

Communication

The repo's owner @tonybaloney (GitHub) was a really nice person. He opened an issue and I managed to close it in only 4 hours because of his responsiveness. He replied to all my questions inside the issue very quickly and provided all clarifications. He approved my PR almost right away, thanked me for my research and wished me luck. He also asked me how I found his repo and my feedback.

Overview

I know that I did not create a major update but it is only my first PR. The most important for me was to start, believe in myself and that I can contribute to other people's projects, get familiar with the open source environment and hacktoberfest, figure out the proper steps and get used to the formalities. Plus, I liked the creative part of it.

One step at a time!