If you don’t already know Hacktoberfest is a month long, coding celebration from October 1st - October 31st. Hacktoberfest is sponsored by Digital Ocean and Github to get people involved in Open Source.
Last week, in the middle of Hacktoberfest, I decided to create a simple project that others may contribute to. Especially if it were their first time, they would be able to make a simple contribution before getting into the, sometimes, complexities of contributions. I made it quite simple for others to get involved with Hacktoberfest.
What you should know that all of us as Flatiron students are already pull-request, Github commiting masters. But what I included in my project is how to manually make a pull request. The more practice you have, the better and more confident you will become in the coding community.
You should make a Hacktoberfest account where you can check out many other projects you can contribute to, find helpful sources, find Hacktoberfest meetups and track the progress you’ve made. When you have reached the (very small and attainable) goal, you will qualify to recieve a free Hacktoberfest t-shirt! And who doesn’t love a free t-shirt?
In the README file of my project, I give guided steps on forking, cloning, creating a new branch, adding your contribution and submitting the pull request. It’s straight-forward and as simple as I could possibly make it. Understand that at one point I was very timid on the entire manual PR process. Now, this is how I’m contributing to the coding community, even in the smallest way. When you’re part of this environment, you learn from others and you help others learn. I want to keep doing that, even with baby steps of explaining what IRB is to more difficult topics such as jQuery.
Give it a go with my Hacktoberfest Project. Make you contribution and feel good about it. You have until October 31st.