Skip to content
rawpixel-296613-unsplash edited

Hacktoberfest 2018: At Carousell with Junior Developer Singapore - Read Time: 4 Minutes

  • Open Source

📅 October 22, 2018

⏱️3 min read

Introduction

  Whenever I hear the word "Open Source", the word "Freedom" always comes to my mind. 

Due to the amount transfer of knowledge, technology, software or services we get to enjoy for free without paying for anything. 

Which is contributed by highly skilled developers donating their time and effort to improve the quality of life through the software projects they contribute to. 

They are the same army of thankless developers or ordinary people that might not be working as a developer in their day job. 

Heading to Carousell for Hackoberfest

Never had I thought that I get to contribute to open source despite knowing about it a decade ago. 

Which probably is the very reason that I had embarked on a journey to work with open source technologies in my day job.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to contribute to open source through a Hacktoberfest event organised by Junior Developer Singapore and venue sponsored by Carousell. 

Tech Talk By Chee Aun

Getting Your Free Hackoberfest T-shirt With 5 Pull Requests

For those who don't know what is Hackoberfest, every year in October. 

It is a celebration of open source software that is initiated by DigitalOcean partnered with Github and Twilio to encourage the contributions to open source projects.

Besides that by contributing 5 pull requests to any open source projects, you get a free t-shirt from both DigitalOcean and Github. 

Due to this incentive and the once in a lifetime chance to experience Carousell office for half a day. I went down to the Carousell office, yesterday to contribute 5 pull request to freecodecamp.

Before the event, there was a list of open source projects posted on the meetup event page.

By 12 pm, there were some tech talks given by some senior members in the developer communities.  

Finding Ways to Contribute

Despite having an extensive list of open source projects. Eventually, I choose to contribute to the both Python and Rest API guides of FreeCodeCamp. That provides educational materials equivalent to coding boot camps online for free. 

Contributing to open source projects for the first time can be daunting. So here is a simple checklist on how I approached it yesterday.

  • Read an article by FreeCodeCamp on how to get started for Hacktoberfest

It was an excellent article that allowed me to get started by registering on Hacktober page by DigitalOcean and editing articles of FreeCodeCamp.

  • Learn how to use Git and GitHub

Most open source projects that I know of are in Github, thus understanding how to use Git and GitHub can help you a lot in contributing. 

  • Shortlist projects that you find is interesting  

If you don't know where to start, you can always jump to the Hacktoberfest for a list of projects to contribute. 

  • How should you contribute with your skills?

First of all, do not worry about your lack of coding skills. Contributing to open source projects do not necessarily require you to have impressive coding skills.

Here are a few ways for you contribute without just coding:

Design - Creating logos, t-shirts, stickers or style guides Documentation - Write or edit project documentation, creating tutorials, how-to guides Organising  - Deleting duplicate issues, asking questions for clarification to progress the issues Planning events - organise workshops, meetups for the project.  

Conclusion

Overall contributing to open source projects is not that daunting of a task after reading some guides on to do it. I will attach the article that is from FreeCodeCamp on how to get started and ways to get your free t-shirt from DigitalOcean.

Hackoberfest-2018: How you can get free your fre t-shirt even your new to coding

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/quincylarson/Hacktoberfest-2018-shirt-tutorial--FDoftlSup

Hackoberfest 2018 By DigitalOcean

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Yours First Contributions Within 5 mins

https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions/blob/master/README.md





← PrevNext →
  • Powered by Contentful
  • Max Ong Zong Bao's DEV Profile