Hacktoberfest Conclusion

This repository really focused on getting people contributing and following the guidelines of pull requests. I believe it was created specifically for the event and would help new contributors with the work flow of GitHub and hopefully is used one day, haha.

My very first PR for Hacktoberfest. If I recall correctly I was scrounging around the Hacktoberfest labelled issues and found this one to commit. I didn’t realize that there would be repositories specifically for the event. I made the commit and realized after the fact that this was indeed one of them. All I really did was add a few files for definitions of words as a JSON object. But it got me started on my PR’s as well as the workflow of making pull requests.

This repository is one of the sponsored Digital Ocean repos. The goal is to help an individual understand a concept of JavaScript code in 30 seconds or less!

My next PR was an attempt to find a more recognized repository to contribute to and I managed to find a description fix for one of the functions. Although I didn’t fix the issue entirely, a portion of my fix was merged. The description didn’t follow the guidelines with labeling prototype functions. Also, I found an issue with the camel case spelling when using the function, small but a requested issue solved none the less.

This is a bot tool used within the Discord application. An electron based app that’s used for community chatting creating public or private channels/servers. This bot adds extra utility to a server allowing for users to interact to play games or music and a bunch more of neat stuff.

I wanted to be able to get this issue solved, but I might understand why it was untouched since February. I initially thought this would be a decent issue and wouldn’t be too hard, but I bumped into a lot of issues on top of not having finished. After driving myself crazy with my multiple node.js installations, I finally got a bot working in one of my discord channels to play with. After that, I wasn’t sure where to actually be implementing this command or even how I should be going about it. Should it be a config to be turned on? Should I have a command that enables/disables? Where do I start implementing the plans? Etc, etc. Instead of asking something like that, I decided to actually get working code to begin with, but what I ended up with is not really a great solution.

The code I created would check the response header for anything above 299 and below 400, but assuming a server doesn’t comply with the HTTP standards, I might not detect the redirect. On top of that, after shortening a URL with google’s shortener, my code wouldn’t always give me the redirection link, pretty weird, but I never finished solving this one.

Again another Hacktoberfest specific repository, but a little more challenging. Other coders solve an issue (which is a little coding puzzle) and add a new one to continually help new contributors.

With this one, I was struggling to find an issue to work on, but found this problem a little more interesting. When I decided to work on it, I found that the problem was even more difficult than anticipated. I couldn’t work out how the values in the test cases were the result so I played with the code for an hour or two. I felt defeated at that point and had to ask the reporter what and how he expects those results. Turns out the test cases were completely wrong and it turned out to be an easy problem.

Another opensource repository for a Discord bot to help with extra utility.

Quick an easy fix, again just browsing the issues and found this one. They had two images side by side, but one was significantly larger. A little inline css in the image link matched their height and viola, fixed issue.

After playing with the online version of the tool, I tested to find the issue and see for myself. I played with the loader, and the different shapes and stuff. Once I changed a few colours and decided to change it back, the selector boxes stayed the colours I chose while the animation went back to the defaults. Simple change within the config file to set the value and they were changing back as anticipated.

Opensource is a lot more difficult than expected, as I began noticing when I was trying to get BastionBot to work. With a bunch of other repos I was trying, I noticed the largest part of my struggle was getting the code to actually work! I know it’s my fault for being lazy on my Windows 10, but what doesn’t help is when I install things in weird places for no particular reason. Really feeling the need to wipe the whole computer and start fresh.
On another note, I struggled a lot to find repositories. I think I really need to find a language or a product that I’m really, truly interested in. I’ve seen my peers really interested in different niches or languages and be able to make large commitments to repositories and I don’t think I’ve found that drive just yet. On the bright side, I know I want to be capable of doing this, I just need to find the right project I can invest myself in. I believe this skill is crucial if I want to make a career in software development as I’m probably going to be thrown in a bunch of projects with no guidance and need to find my way on my own. Thus I need to work on this more.

Thus I guess my newbie advice would be to find something that you can truly throw your focus into and don’t be crazy like me and install the same thing into multiple places…

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