HacktoberFest 2021 is in the Repos. So how did it go?

Success!

This is my second time completing the HacktoberFest challenge. Over the past month I've submitted a total of five pull requests to open source projects. As of this writing four have been accepted one is pending. The last one was just submitted on the final day of the event.

Of the accepted Pull requests, three have matured and one will mature tomorrow. Then it will be official.

What Did I Do?

1 of 4 towards goal

I started HacktoberFest with Virtual Coffee's Kickoff event. Bekah and Dan Ott hosted a Zoom event where new members could add themselves to our Virtual Coffee site. Dan led us through the process of forking a repo and, working on the issue, and then submitting a pull request.

This year the Virtual Coffee group added member profiles. New and existing could add their social media links to the members page. I added mine and had my first PR.

2 of 4 towards goal

My next pull request was helping Dominic's new project. He's building a python project using Turtle Graphics canvas. I've seen some art made with canvas. Dominic wanted the Mac instruction for opening the project. I described how to cd into the project and open it. This sounds like a cool project, I hope he keeps building it.

3 of 4 towards goal

Next, I wrote some Documentation for Virtual Coffee. They wanted an expanded Pull Request Template. I fleshed out the instructions and commented out the help text, so that once the PR was submitted the standard text would not appear on screen.

I learned more about how GitHub's pull request process works how to write more informative pull requests. To document the process I made test PRs to my private repo. I couldn't find the option to make a draft pull request to a project. So I searched for answers.

GitHub's blog said draft PRs are not available on private repos. So, I made a test PR to on of my public repos. And saw the Draft PR option. I submitted the pull request. Digital Ocean alerted me that my project wasn't participating in HacktoberFest.

Which it wasn't. I don't have an open source project. It good that they tell people that projects aren't participation so that Maintainers don't get spammed by people looking for junk PRs. I'm glad they made it so maintainers must Opt-in Hacktoberfest for PRs to count.

4 of 4 towards goal

My Fourth PR was for ThisDot Labs. They have a repo that list tech podcasts and wanted a Table of Content (TOC) for the list. I used markdown to build the TOC. I learned how to make a table in markdown and later used skill that to make a table in some notes I have for a personal project.

5 of 4 extra.

Last day of the month I did one more for ThisDot Labs. I added a newsletter link to their list of newsletters.

Conclusion

I enjoyed working on open-source projects and loved the support I got throughout the process. I appreciate that HacktoberFest is pushing Open Source.

Did you participate in HacktoberFest?

What did you help build?