A race against time and other open source devs to qualify for open issues on repositories you are interested in.
What a great past time activity that is also accredited for school.
Hacktoberfest! What a great idea. Especially in these interesting and difficult times.
It has finally ended. The busiest month I have ever lived through. It was not that bad to be honest. I have gotten through a lot worse (I think).
Welp, this blog will serve as a recap to the most interesting event I have participated in, Hacktoberfest. The point of Release 0.2 was to contribute to at least 3 different repos and make 4 different PRs.
What a great experience to gain knowledge in different projects and languages... UGH Python.
Without further adu, Season 1 Recap of my Hacktoberfest journey.
Release 0.2.1 - Entry into Open Source
To get into the swing of Open Source contributions, I wanted to start off with something small. The first repository I chose was of a website that I had used on occasion to keep up with VR news when I first bought my Oculus Quest HMD. Unfortunately, I found a more intriguing website that contained more up-to-date information and game release/news. My first PR was to locate a script that was returning a status code 404. This was not that hard, like at all (thanks chrome dev tools). I made an issue on the repo and created a PR that had simply commented out the script returning a 404, which was doing nothing anyways. I think the maintainer does not check his github often since the issue and PR still remain open, Oh well.
Release 0.2.2 - Entering Another (Virtual) Reality
This was by far the most exciting repo I worked on throughout the whole month. I love virtual reality and I am really glad I got to contribute to this repo because the whole idea behind it is very neat. Oculus Quest is a standalone headset and has no connection to your PC. This owner of the project created a link to your HMD and PC through your LAN so that the Quest can communicate with discord and update your "discord presence", or simply put what game you are playing at the moment. I felt really accomplished with this PR because, I was finally doing something I have a passion for. I made a PR to update his JSON file which contained all sorts of applications and games. I even chatted with "MadMagic" on discord and we are now friends and talk regularly.
Release 0.2.3 - Avoiding Boring People with Chat Automation
My third PR was actually two smaller PRs. Why two? Well, because I didn't think it was enough for the fixes I made on the first one. I found this really neat repository that was basically a chat automation bot for the whatsapp web-based platform. The chatbot did everything you could imagine a chatbot doing. The maintainer was looking for a small refactor on his code by including a different style of CSS selectors from calling his constant selector class file. I replaced the selectors the way he wanted and got acquainted a little more with python, my arch nemesis. For the second PR of my third PR I had to basically copy the basic logic of his whatsapp bot, but make slight modifications so that a facebook session is made (click link above for more details).
Release 0.2.4 - More Pythonic Automation
This was yet another contribution towards automation bots. However this was tailored only to scraping elements from the whatsapp web-based platform. The maintainer (Navpreet) wanted me to write a function to scrape and return a phone number of a specific person that the user has an existing chat with. Really neat and as it turns out not that easy. It was interesting seeing how code varies from machine to machine. A problem I encountered was that the code ran fine on my machine and did the intended task, but once Navpreet ran it on his end it gave him an error (see blog for more details).That was it for the month. Overall the experience was amazing and I will definately participate in next years Hacktoberfest. I really enjoyed getting involved in various projects and most importantly I made friends and (Hopefully) connections by interacting with the project maintainers. There are a lot of people that are like minded and have the same cores and interests as I do, no matter where in the world they are. a big thank you to my professor for picking something so interesting to get us involved.
Oh and I made my 4 + 1 Hacktoberfest accepted PRs even though 2 of the PRs I made for Release 0.2 were not in hacktoberfest repos.
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