Hack2BEtter'20
Tags: hacktoberfest, programming, github, opensourced
Published: 2020-11-08 17:48:27


### ```py 
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 

### ```css
#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.

### ```py
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.

### ```brainfuck
++++[++++>---<]>.+[--->+<]>+++.-.++++++.--.---------.-------.[--->+<]>-.-.-----------.++++++.-.
```

* First-Timers Only Repos
 * [Awesome Hacktoberfest Plant a Tree](https://github.com/OtacilioN/awesome-hacktoberfest-plant-a-tree)
 * [Hack-Day-2020](https://github.com/lugnitdgp/Hack-Day)
 * [Inspirational Quotes](https://github.com/vinitshahdeo/inspirational-quotes)
 * [Hacktoberfest Sign-in](https://github.com/GoodGuyGregory/hacktoberfest-signin)
* Begineer Repos
 * [Happy Birthday! - Coder's way of wishing](https://github.com/vinitshahdeo/HBD)
 * [A collection of Codewars Katas](https://github.com/GoodGuyGregory/codewars_katas)
 * [Python Scripts!](https://github.com/ozamed/Python-Scripts)
 * [Hacktober'20 Unit Converter](https://github.com/norabalogh/Hacktober20-unit-converter)
* Intermediate Repo
 * [Swedish SSN Validator](https://github.com/fossbarrow/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!