DRIntroduction
We're six days into Hacktoberfest, and I'm quickly realizing that my goals are going to be a bit harder to reach than I initially envisioned.
Why?
I'm pretty new to open source. Not an expert, but I know about the workflow and how to do the simple stuff like make a PR.
So in theory, I'm technically capable of doing this. 100%.
The issue that I've been combating for the past week hasn't been technically challenging, it's been more of a mental struggle. I'm always hearing that open source needs more contributors, but looking around at repositories I find that every issue that is manageable is always being snapped up before I get to it.
Is this a problem on my end? Should I be quicker on the uptake when issues are posted? Am I not looking hard enough?
What I'm doing
My current Hacktoberfest finding schema looks something like this.
- Go to the Hacktoberfest projects site.
- Sort the projects by JavaScript, and find the ones that have between 0 and 50 stars.
- Sort by most recently updated.
And honestly, I've been getting a whole bunch of this.
I actually contributed to one, but it got shut down a few days ago because it turned out that repos like it were generating a ton of low quality contributions.
So what do I do? I'm being told that there's plenty of work, I'm not finding anything obvious to work on that fits with the values of the event.
What am I doing wrong?
So I've thought about it, and I've come to a conclusion.
Issues that are listed aren't the only things to fix.
This made sense. An issue on my end was that everything that was documented was being snatched up; everything that was on the table was being taken too fast.
What if I took something that wasn't on the table?
A new feature, a typo in the content, etc. Something that no one has noticed yet.
Tackling things like these would let me contribute 1) to something other than a list of stuff, and 2) with a guaranteed issue.
Going forward
I've got 26 days left (including today, because you can always do something valuable with the time in front of you). That's plenty of time to find contributions in the wild. Fingers crossed.
Anyone else have thoughts on contributing to the event? Where are you finding your repositories?
As always, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day!
