My Experience with HacktoberFest 2020
As we all know, the year 2020 has been a rollercoaster ride. As we slowly eased up into this new way of leading life amidst the ongoing pandemic, things slackened up quite a bit.
Come October and all of a sudden I kept seeing the word HacktoberFest coming up almost everywhere. I had no clue what this meant and was curious to know what the hype was all about. I then looked around and got to know that HacktoberFest is a month long celebration of Open Source Software (also known as OSS) hosted by DigitalOcean while partnering with DEV and Github. It particularly aims to promote and celebrate Open Source.Given that all this was new to me, I was quite intrigued with this opportunity to dive deep into the world of Open Source.
According to the challenge in HacktoberFest, a participant had to make 4 valid Pull Requests (also called PR) in Github repositories which had the tag hacktoberfest on it. Once these 4 pull requests were merged into the respective repositories and passed the 14 day review period, the participant was eligible to win a Tshirt and limited edition stickers or could choose to plant a tree as well!
I began my journey by first going through some tutorials on how to fork and clone a repository, what it meant to create an issue and what exactly pull requests meant, etc. Majority of this information was available on the HacktoberFest website in the form of tutorials.
Then I started looking around for some simple repositories to which I could contribute. I was a bit scared considering that all this was brand new to me. After several hours of searching and learning, I finally found some repositories which interested me and I contributed based on the contributing guidelines mentioned. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but the online community was very supportive and helpful. With each PR that was getting merged, my confidence too went up and I actually started enjoying more and worrying less.
Over the span of 3 days, I made a total of 9 PRs to several repositories in Github. Now came the most crucial part — the 14 day review period. After what felt like a long time, the 14 day review period was over and I finally recieved the email from Digital Ocean stating that I had succesfully completed the challenge. I was ecstatic, to say the least!
Around the same time, I got to know about Crio.Do’s #IBelieveInDoing Hacktoberfest edition challenge. In this challenge, a participant could choose to participate as a Creator or as a Learner, or both.
The Creator was supposed to create Microbytes which is like a small learning module. However, the catch here was that the microbyte should follow a Learn By Doing approach, that is, the microbyte had to be created in a way which would engage the learner. It was recommended to include activites and challenges in the microbyte via which the learner could get hands-on learning instead of just providing theoretical information on the topic.
The Learner is supposed to learn from the microbytes created by the creators by solving the challenges and tasks mentioned in the particular microbyte.
I participated in this challenge as a Creator. There were quite a lot of domains such as DSA, System Design, Database, Networking, etc to choose from. I created 2 microbytes — one in DSA and another one in Networking.
When we are done creating our microbyte, it is first reviewed by the Crio Advocates. They give tips and help us in improving our microbytes and also suggest changes if required. After the microbyte matches the required structure and provided that it follows the “learn by doing” approach, it is then merged into the repository. The feeling of finally getting the microbyte merged is quite satisfying and pleasant, to say the least! It is even more satisfying to see the learners actually use the microbyte and solve the challenges!
After the microbyte gets merged, the Crio Advocates also add the Creator as a Contributer with some badges to the ReadMe file of the repository in which the microbyte was created. I was quite proud to see my name there :)
Moreover, I was also chosen as Developer of the Day for my microbyte “Binary Tree- Level Order Traversal and Types”! It was quite unreal for me!
The entire #IBelieveInDoing challenge was organised wonderfully. The Crio Advocates were very helpful and supportive which made contributing even more fun. The entire experience was just amazing!
Looking back at it now, I feel happy for having been able to overcome my apprehensions and fear about the world of Open Source. The entire process of being clueless, to being fascinated, to actually enjoying and finally overcoming my apprehensions was very enlightening to me. I am quite proud of myself for having been able to complete this challenge inspite of being a newbie.
I would like to thank Hacktoberfest, DigitalOcean and Crio.Do for giving me this wonderful opportunity to contribute to Open Source and become a part of the community. I also got to learn quite a lot in the long run. I would like to encourage newbies like me to keep their fears aside and be a part of this exciting journey. Looking forward to more such challenges!
Thank You,
Anjali Kamath
