print("Bonjour !")

Hey guys! It's Roni, I'm a newbie developer, who is trying to find a branch right now, and also a high school student in Istanbul. To be honest, I wasn't familiar at all when I participated at Hacktoberfest'20, with technologies like GitHub, with philosophies like Open Source, freedom in technology and also I had only some basic background knowledge about JavaScript, Python and PHP, so I was a bit discouraged to not being able to do much. This made me to do some researches about the prerequisites, thus I found some really cool events to participate. Even though I had a month full of school work and exams weeks, I guess I managed to meet lots of cool and determined people from all over the world - do you reliase that, the internationality (globality); I guess it's one of the best things which you can witness!- from different cultural, lingual and geographical backgrounds! From them, I learned lots of things, from new programming syntaxes to new best-practices...

Naturally, I had lots of paradoxes which I couldn't get out of, but I achieved them with the new techniques, determinism and perspectives gave by the community. Honestly, I'm not a tidy person, that means I make lots of plans with a great precision but can't follow it properly as I programmed it. While this event, I forced myself to organize my time, make a proper plan, set realistic goals with a neat To-Do list -which I coded with Kotlin for a beginner project in android- and make them happen step by step! With this technique, I could spot new bugs, debugged them and finally transform them into new features: INABIAF

Also I started to watch some pretty cool projects -like OpenSauced, Infection Monkey, Swimm etc.- and follow super people -like bdougie (creator of OpenSauced), crazy4pi314 (quantum engineer), MLH team etc.-. I learned how Hacktahons work, why do they exist, it's different types and how to be a "Hackathoner". I wrote lots of code, faced with a ton of errors, got bored, gave up, but in the end I pretty much enjoyed! The most interesting thing for me, was the philosophy behind this great and functioning system: Open Source. Likewise Freedom, Equal Rights of Access to anything, difference between Equality, Equity and Justice, Marxism, Class Inequality, Racism, Censorship, Capitalism were some of the concepts that I digged in to learn and try to integrate. Ah I forgot to mention that I read the Hacker Manifesto, that was really interesting and explanatory. Those concepts helped to me to be able to look at life from a different perspective. I asked so many questions and got to know how to search them and find their answers. I realised that programming can be used to identify multidisiplinary problems and solve their problems. There was one thing that I couldn't do which was halting lol

#myself {
 background: none;
}

I hadn't got much of a programming background. I was just familliar with the syntax of Python and JavaScript which I find them pretty amazing interpreted languages :) Before this event, I was using Git and GitHub just to save, to store my different scripts or codes, I haven't heard of programming paradigms, design patterns, common algorithms and data structures, program efficiency etc. and also I was writing code or more scripts without paying attention to the comments, I was finding them useless if it's my own code. I guess I wasn't that wrong, but Hacktoberfest pushed me to communicate and work like a team on the problems and new features.

print("60%|██████    | 6/10 [00:18<00:12,  0.33 it/s]")

As I mentioned, I had a busy month going on so at start I wasn't so active, but when I searched and learned more about it, I think that it pulled me in and I couldn't resist to it, and started my journey. First, I was just wandering around, searching which projects I could contribute to. I found some projects that I can contribute without coding, like modifying README file, translating content or documenting the program. The more contributions I made the more I felt confident and so I passed to real programming projects which I'll put them in the next sector. I guess even though I didn't create lots of new features or solve lots of issues or make the project jump to a new era, I familiarized with the main concepts.

++++[++++>---<]>.+[--->+<]>+++.-.++++++.--.---------.-------.[--->+<]>-.-.-----------.++++++.-.

• First-Timers Only Repos
  • Awesome Hacktoberfest Plant a Tree
  • Hack-Day-2020
  • Inspirational Quotes
  • Hacktoberfest Sign-in
• Begineer Repos
  • Happy Birthday! - Coder's way of wishing
  • A collection of Codewars Katas
  • Python Scripts!
  • Hacktober'20 Unit Converter
• Intermediate Repo
  • Swedish SSN Validator still working on

R3fL3ct10nS

Briefly, this event has pushed me to try more to build, to think and to imagine; going beyond the limits in project maintaining, contributing, searching for issues... While contributing to open source projects, I learned some best practices for coding programming, using some design patterns, simplifying the code, developing new ways to achieve the same problem without reinventing the wheel again, documenting and commenting in a proper way to be able to make the code more understandable and the most important. I will definetely participate it again and again!

See you at Hacktoberfest'21!