Hello all!

I'd like to walk you through my initial thoughts as a first time Hacktoberfest participant.

For those that don't know what Hacktoberfest is, it is an annual event hosted by DigitalOcean during the month of October that encourages people around the world to interact with open source projects.

People can interact with open source projects in many ways, as either a contributor or a maintainer of a project.

For me, I am focused on contributing to open source projects and this is really nice because Hacktoberfest gives myself and other contributors a clear goal to achieve as a contributor.

By the end of October (and by extension, Hacktoberfest), I need to submit four high quality pull requests such that they get merged into another person's/organization's repository. If I am successful with my four contributions, I will get a digital badge that represents my ability to make four successful contributions:

Some of the pull requests I have submitted have already been merged and are now waiting to be processed by Hacktoberfest to see if they are valid:

My first pull request that was merged was one that I did for my friend, Vinh on his repository called, barrierless. For more details on my pull request and my process of contributing to Vinh's repository, you can read my other blog, since it was quite an involved process.

However, what I want to highlight is that pull requests can come in all different forms and sizes. As such, I don't want to highlight a pull request like this for those that are intimidated to contributing to open source projects and/or Hacktoberfest.

As such, let me show you my second pull request, which is many times more simple than what I did for Vinh, where I fixed a simple spelling mistake.

See? This wasn't too hard of a thing to change! However, as someone who is trying to grow as an open source developer, I'm aiming to do much more than fix one or two spelling mistakes for my pull requests.

Going forward, I plan on sifting through many more README.md files and attempting to run said projects by following their pre-existing instructions.

If those instructions work fine, then great! I will try to understand the codebase before trying to work on any existing issues that repository might have.

If I can't run a project's code based on their instructions, I will takes that as an opportunity to perhaps, offer suggestion on improving the repository's documentation.

Now, for my final thoughts.

For those that have found repositories to contribute to, but are worried that your pull requests won't count because the repository you're interested in hasn't added one of the following:

1. The Hacktoberfest topic on the repository

1. The Hacktoberfest-Accepted label on the issue

1. The Hacktoberfest-Accepted label on your pull request

My greatest advice to you is just ask!

You can always ask the maintainer of a project to add any of those Hacktoberfest related features to their repository such that your pull request contribution counts. People are friendlier than you think! I encourage you to reach out with the maintainers of projects and build a rapport with them since they're human, just like you.

And with that said I bid you, adieu!