Hacktoberfest 2018 – My experience

Hacktoberfest 2018, was a great learning experience for me. I was able to find a great project for this event, that fit my interest’s and ability’s.

Starting this event was a bit challenging, I knew I wanted to work with something with java script. And I also, wanted to work on more front end development. So this helped me narrow down what project to work on, picking a project to work on took some time. After looking through the Hacktoberfest tag on GitHub for a while I came across the Node Chat app that was using node and socket IO to create a chat app. The owner of the project wanted to recreate the test site using react. This peaked my interest, since I was familiar with react, node and socketIO,  so I took on the task of creating this react site for my first pull request for Hacktoberfest 2018.

After my first PR on the Node Chat I asked to continue working on the react app. The owner of the app invited me to be a maintainer for this project. So, for the rest of Hacktoberfest I worked on bugs and features of the react app.

My Hacktoberfest 2018 Pull Requests and Issues

  1. https://github.com/joshghent/NodeChat/issues/11
    https://github.com/joshghent/NodeChat/pull/24
  2. https://github.com/OTRChat/NodeChat/pull/27
  3. https://github.com/OTRChat/NodeChat/pull/28
  4. https://github.com/OTRChat/NodeChat/pull/29
  5. https://github.com/OTRChat/NodeChat/issues/1
    https://github.com/OTRChat/NodeChat/pull/30

Overall, I had a very positive experience in Hacktoberfest 2018. I learned allot about git, especially using branches. I now use branches all the time for whenever I want to test something or work on a issue or feature. And after making 5 PR’s I am much more comfortable with the process.

Now that I know events like Hacktoberfest exist, I am definitely going to keep an eye out for them, in the future.

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