Hacktoberfest-Contributing to open source

Hi There! Hope everyone is doing good and taking care. We all know that open source is a boon to the world as it has helped a number of people to learn, produce and excel. So many people have lost their fear of opening up and sharing through their amazing open source contributions.

There is a great saying

“Sharing is caring”

and once you start doing open source contributions there is no going back.

Talking about the main hero of the show… Tada…

Hacktoberfest — The open source festival

This is an awesome initiative for budding developers or designers. It is a bang on motivation for the people who are ready to make the world a better place by fixing issues or contributing their wonderful ideas to the ongoing projects or a new project.

It is really helpful if we feel bugged by any application (it should be open source). We can raise a PR(pull request) to fix that bug. See its that simple.

I remember the time when we participated in the MLH(Major League Hacking) where we were using an library to support a chat window. We came across a bug where the image format was not supported in the upload option so we found the issue fixed it and raised the PR for the same. See, thats the beauty of open source.

Talking about how you can start your hacktoberfest journey as a participant. Its really simple, you just have to follow these simple steps.

1. Find issues to contribute to respositories that come under hacktoberfest. https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest
2. Select your languauge in which you want to contribute. For example: javascript or hit this : https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest?l=javascript
3. For good first issues you can search using this url: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22+label%3A%22hacktoberfest%22 or search this is:open is:issue label:”good first issue” label:hacktoberfest
4. You can again sort using the language

1. Make sure you read the Readme and the contributing files before picking up issues
2. If you are a beginner try to always pick up simple issues.
3. Get yourself assigned to the issue so that no one else takes it up.
4. Once you have fixed the issue raise a PR and mention the issue link in the PR description so that it will be linked to the issue.
5. You will have to raise 4 valid PRs that should have hacktoberfest-accepted label to earn the swags.
6. Make sure the PRs are merged by the end of the month.

Lets contribute. Happy Coding !

Originally published at https://www.simranraj.in/hacktoberfest-contributing-to-open-source