My first experience in open-source
Yes, I solved an issues 😁.
October is ending in a few days, and the month of Hacktoberfest goes with it. With this article, I want to share my experience participating in a hackathon, where I had the opportunity to work and contribute to an open-source project called chaoss-slack-bot. If you are excited to know if I contributed code, let me tell you that no, wait, it was code, but Markdown code, I did not fix bugs, add features, or enhance existing codes, my first contribution was based on translating this project’s documentation from English to Portuguese. And guess what, 😏 my contribution was accepted and merged into the main branch. And it was a lot of fun.
Hacktoberfest
Before explaining what I learned from this experience, I want to explain what Hacktoberfest is, based on an article that someone from my community shared the link in our group, I think this could be one of the best articles that explain how to start contributing to open source when I read this I could understand it well. The article is here, take a look and maybe you can share with me what you think about this open source world and if it was helpful.
What I have learned
With this experience, I was able to understand how important it is to contribute to open-source projects after participating in the Angola Open-source community activity, which was a full day of activity focused on open-source as well as seeing and learning about some projects in which we can contribute.
It was at this event that I had the pleasure of starting my journey in resolving some open issues in the chaoss-slack-bot project.
The important lesson that I had with this experience was:
- Before you start solving the problem, you need to carefully read what the project is about, README file.
- When choosing the type of contribution you want to make, read and pay attention to what the project maintainers are asking you to do.
- Take a look and understand what other collaborators did on the project.
- Pay attention to the comments that maintainers make in their PR (pull requests).
- Take time to analyze and respond to comments made on your PR.
- Have fun and learn in the process.
More contributions
In the end, it was a very good experience to be part of Hacktoberfest, where I was able to contribute to an open-source project, and my 4 PR (pull request) was accepted and merged into the main branch 🥳.
We can contribute to open source in different ways with code, articles, videos, blog posts, tweets about a specific programming language, etc. I still want to contribute in all these ways by educating others about technology, especially people in my community.