Late But Better Than Never

Unfortunately, I am late to the Hacktoberfest party and I was only able to contribute to 2 open source projects out of 4 which I wanted to do, during the 2023 Hacktoberfest. This was due to life circumstances, but now I am finally able to post about my contributions and share my experience. I still plan on contributing to 2 more open source projects even though the Hacktoberfest is over, to reach my goal of 4 contributions. So, this is my first post out of the 4 or 5 post series that I will make about this experience.

First Issue

For my first contribution I chose something nice and easy to get my feet wet. So I decided to work on the documentation side of a project. I came across this issue where the project owner wanted to add a CONTRIBUTING.md file to his project. I found this to be interesting since I have never made a CONTRIBUTING.md file for a project before. I reached out in the comment section of the issue and asked the project owner to assign it to me.

Making a CONTRIBUTING.md

After I was assigned the issue, I forked the repo and created a new branch to work on the issue. I started to research and look at other open source projects' COTRIBUTING.md files. Once I had an overall understanding about what was needed and the set of guidelines I wanted to include in my file, I started to work on writing it. I also used the project's README.md file as my reference to make sure to include the parts that were relevant to contribution guidelines. Additionally, I realized that a lot of the open source projects I looked at had a code of conduct document as well, so I decided to add a CODE_Of_CONDUCT.md file too. For the code of conduct document I decided to go with and use the Contributor Covenant v2.1. After I finished making both files I committed, pushed my changes, and made a pull request which can be found here

Feedback From The Owner

After I made my PR I waited for the owner to review it. He kindly asked me to change the PR name, update it's description and submit an updated PR. I happily made the changes based on the feedback he provided and submitted this PR . He then approved it and merged the changes.

What I Learned

This was a great first step for me to search for open source project issues on Github and find problems or features that I am interested in contributing to. Also, I learned about the importance of contribution guidelines and code of conduct, specially when there are many contributors and there is a need for a set of rules and standards to insure consistency and to provide an environment for everyone that makes them feel welcomed and encourages contribution.