Make your first Open Source Contribution with Hacktoberfest

A lot of times, New Coders who are very passionate about contributing to Open Source Projects, end up not doing so because of a variety of a reasons and one of them that stands out always is that They hardly know/believe it doesn’t require expert-level coding skills for them to start contributing for open source. New Coders often forget the fact that even fixing a typo on the documentation or Readme markdown file on a github repo would add a green tile to your github activity — which officially makes your entry to Open Source Contribution.

If you have never done so, nor have only stalked github repositories or used them — It’s high time for you to make your contribution to the open source community — after all, that’s how communities have always have been built and grown.

Courtesy: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Digital Ocean has partnered with Github, bringing Hacktoberfest.

Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source software.

Yes, It does come with some prize (T-Shirt). But that’s not the reason why you should submit your first Pull Request (PR). A lot of things in our life happens because of someone sitting somewhere in the world is doing some open source contribution which is impacting our life — either in our day job or indirectly through one of the services that we enjoy.

Courtesy: http://pyfound.blogspot.in/2017/09/

Consider my case, I’m a Full-Time Data Scientist a Public Company. There is hardly a day passes in my life without me using dplyr, one of the most famous R-Packages for my Data Analysis — created by Hadley Wickham. He is single-handedly the author of so many most-frequently used R-Packages in the world of Data Analysis and Data Science. Does it he get paid for creating those? No, He doesn’t. But he does it because of his interest to improve the community that he belongs to. To push the tribe that he’s part of ahead.

And that’s why I made by first open source contribution and you should also make your first open source contribution — it could be a PR with simple typo fix in a Readme markdown on github or it could be something else more complex. But making sure that unlike majority of the people around us, we just don’t consume free information, but also contribute to it, in order to strengthen the community which in many ways drive our daily life forward.

Courtesy: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

More resources:

• Hacktoberfest labelled Projects on Github
• Hacktoberfest — Official Site
• Hackernoon Opne Source Tagged
• A junior developer’s step-by-step guide to contributing to open source for the first time
• Find out more about how you can contribute to open source