Hacktoberfest Recap
Tags: beginners, opensource, hacktoberfest
Published: 2022-10-31 23:17:35

## Week 1
In the beginning, I was rather anxious about the prospect of contributing to projects on GitHub, as I feared I might not know enough or would face a lot of rejection. 
In the first week, I worked on a translation issue for the telescope project, as described in [my first Hacktoberfest post](https://dev.to/cychu42/hacktoberfest-week-1-document-translation-18hh). It was for translating the About page from English to Mandarin, which I speak. I thought: "Well, it can't be that hard, and I have done this kind of things enough times already."
It was a good first step, as I felt I was in my element. The work and pleasant interaction with the reviewer got me feeling more comfortable and confident in my contribution.
I learned more about the workflow of contributing to a project there and interacting with reviewers there. I also learned about varies technical terms that I haven heard before, as well as how to handle their translation. Sometimes, you don't want to translate everything. It's enough to keep the terms as they are, since English is so commonly used, unless the language you are translating to has a proper translation for the terms you are dealing with.

## Week 2
During that week, I worked on a repo that's aimed to provide transcript support and wrote [a post](https://dev.to/cychu42/hacktoberfest-week-2-transcript-4f74) about it.
The owner of the repo has a podcast about software engineering, and they wanted help to edit and update computer-generated transcripts to make sure they are properly done.
In the one I worked on, there were varies typo, missing content, and incorrect time code. From that, I learned more about how to properly write and format transcript with accessibility in mind, such as how to denote sounds and speakers. I also felt even more comfortable about contributing to repos and the workflow.

## Week 3
In [that week](https://dev.to/cychu42/hacktoberfest-week-3-3im0), with the experience and confident I got from past weeks, I worked on an issue to add a new feature to a text reader.
The owner wanted to allow the user to input text into the command line to be read. It was relatively easy as far as the amount of code I needed to add. After studying the tool, I realized I could easily reuse the existing text reading feature's code with minor tweaks to create the new feature by skipping the file reading to go straight to text reading. The owner wanted the command input format to differ from the existing feature, so I had to do a bit more coding to make it happen.
From that, I learned the importance of studying and reusing existing code to achieve more elegant solution to a problem.
I also learned a bit more about how to use [Chalk npm package](https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk), like using it with template literals, from studying the code.

## Week 4
In the final week, I took the growth I had from past weeks to go back to work on another issue for the telescope project, as I wrote in [my last post](https://dev.to/cychu42/hacktoberfest-week-4-wrap-up-and-overflow-50fk). This one is about some text overflow issue on the information review page at the end of sign-up.
By this time, I'm already familiar with the general workflow of contributing to a repo, especially the way this project does it because I had done an issue for the repo before. Feeling more comfortable with my ability to solve issues, even if that means seeking additional resources, I worked on the issue and got the PR merged. It involved mostly CSS and a bit of HTML code to handle the overflow, but it also involved some Javascript coding because the code uses functions to handle CSS creation. I learned more about how to work with CSS to handle overflow, utilize ellipses, and add text display on hover.

## Closing
Looking back, I realize I'm now much more confident regarding working on other people's projects because of the experiences I gained in the past weeks. I realize people are very welcoming in general, so there's no need to fear rejection. At most, I just had one encounter where the repo owner ignored me for some reason, even though I did nothing different from other people in the same repo.
Whenever I successfully solved a problem or came up with something new to the reviewer, I felt a sense of achievement, especially when my PRs got merged. In that moment, I knew I contributed to something.
I also learned quiet a few things in the process of reading other people's codes and doing researches to solve problems.