Release 0.2 and Hacktoberfest Lessons
Tags: opensource
Published: 2020-10-31 20:41:02

This is it. The last blog post I'm making for Hacktoberfest. Not everything was perfect, it was rocky, shaky, I feel proud of lots, less proud of other things, but it was an experience I would have again for sure.

## 0 to... 0.2

This month has truly been a landmark time for me professionally, personally, and skill-wise. I think I genuinely stepped up and learned a lot of different techniques and frameworks over the course of the month. From Hugo to Discord bots, I think my biggest takeaway from the month is that all you need to do to learn a new way of developing or a new kind of medium is to just dive in and fix a bug in a project. I never realized it but going in and trying to test a simple fix to a bug in a Discord bot could lead to me learning how to set up my own, getting a peek at thee kind of code that makes it up, and learning how to launch one all at once. It sounds simplistic and I admit it is a little bit, but I think I gained the knowledge that all I need to do to learn is to just _try_.

I think that's what being a contributor is, a constant cycle of learning new things, styles, frameworks, etc. and tinkering with them and helping others with their projects at the same time. It's an amazing and freeing experience.

## "Progress"

I think my natural instinct is to not feel like I've made progress as a developer but I also think the facts say otherwise.

Progress is definitely something you can measure and stick on a graph and people say otherwise because they feel like they don't make that progress. I for sure don't. But the reason we don't feel like we make progress is at that moment we don't feel the progress we made yesterday or even the week before. But if I look at the work I did the first week of Hacktoberfest and the work I did this last week? They look markedly different. In the first and second weeks, I changed readme files and added some trailing commas. Last week I learned how to set up a Discord bot and test it on its own server. I think the number of things I've learned is the best mark of progress for Hacktoberfest this year.

## Next time...

The bar for ratcheting up goes much higher than what I set this month, so I think I'll have a great time taking on more complicated issues and projects in the near future. Next time though, I think I'll be more preceptive of issues. During Hacktoberfest, GitHub has been inundated with garbage issues and pull requests that clog up the search pages and popular projects. I know there's not much to be done about this and I have no idea how to stem such a tide. However, I think individually I'll be a lot more perceptive of issues and less discerning of what I'm willing to work on. I spent a lot of time this month looking for the right issues when the best issues I worked on were the ones that forced me to learn new things and step outside my comfort zone.

That's what I'll do differently, even outside Hacktoberfest, I'll be a lot more open to working on things I frankly have very little knowledge about.

## My Favourite Issue

Without a doubt, my favourite issue to work on was this past weeks issue: the Discord bot. I had tons of fun setting it up and working with the maintainers was a complete breeze. I loved every second of it and I'll definitely go back to it to help fix more issues in the future. An absolute joy. 

I also learned a lot! Like I said I had to set it up and test myself and I had to edit the automated testing file to have it recognize the options I added.

## In the end

So that's the end of Hacktoberfest, it's been a busy month for more than just coding. I moved into my own place, commuted for 2/3 of the month, and still managed to get done 5 pull requests. Some more worthwhile than others, I'll admit, but I'm still happy with the work I did and excited to continue on toward more open source work and more new things to learn.