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 Twilio’s open pixel art project
What I’ve learned from this experience is that it’s 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:
Clone your fork:
git clone git@github.com:YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-FORKED-REPO.gitAdd 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 upstreamUpdating your fork from original repo to keep up with their changes:
git pull upstream master
Ever since the web 2.0 days, I was a supporter of open source software and now that I’m 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! 👩💻