From "Free T-shirts" to Open Source

I remember I couldn't just stand it when my friends started sharing screenshots of their email they received saying "You've completed the Hacktoberfest challenge! click the link below to claim your free T-shirts". I wanted one of these T-shirts as well. However, I never started contributing to the open-source as I felt this is a long and boring process, to study somebody's entire project then fixing their issues. I wanted to make meaningful contributions to some of the open-source projects, though I knew a lot many people who just made irrelevant commits to the projects, just for the sake of completing the challenge.

I had started off on the 4th of October 2020 with a simple PR that corrects the typos, grammatical mistakes and added some valuable points to the README.md file regarding the software project been developed, this was the "Kick-Off" of my open source journey.

Though I wasn't totally satisfied with these qualities of PR, I aimed at making some minor fixes in the codebase to help the owner of the project actually execute the functions, previously abandoned due to the bugs. I then completed my second, third, and fourth pull requests.

I had made four pull requests to 3 different projects by the 22nd of October, which was sufficient for me to achieve the Hacktoberfest swags and T-shirts but I didn't stop I was determined to make the maximum pull requests I could within the time-frame of the challenge.

I gradually started following some of the open-source contributors on you-tube, GitHub, and LinkedIn to actually get to know the right way to follow on a project hosted in GitHub and making valuable contributions to it, I also followed the format they followed to make commits and making Pull requests for the ease of the reviewer to view the changes and make him understand the flow of my code using appropriate descriptions and comments.

By the 30th of October, I had made 12 more contributions to open source and was happy to call my self valuable member of the open-source community worldwide. I got my order confirmation as well as an appreciation email from the Digital Ocean team.

And today it's the 5th of January 2021, the day I am writing this article that I received the awesome swags and T-shirts. Thank you Digital Ocean, DEV Community, and GitHub for bringing me to this level in my career.

Do check out my unboxing video of the swags by Digital Ocean.

Link to my youtube video: