A couple of days in the office handing over a project onto colleagues before travelling on holiday so worthy mentions will be sparse for this week and into next week. However, I will try to seek out some dev-related references when out and about- I wonder if HK has a strong web development community? 🤔 This good prove to be an excellent chance for some hipster-alternative dev photo shoots! I'm thinking my portfolio avatar photos could do with a spruce up- maybe coding while on a hike???

I'm glad to see that I managed to achieve Hacktoberfest’s minimum requirements which is 4 approved PRs in open source contribution from two to three very supportive projects maintained by helpful coders. You can check out the contributions on my profile.

They were quite trivial codebases but it was nice that a few of these exist where you can get familiar with GitHub’s source control management system. Especially good for those new to the industry or those who don’t use GitHub that much- it teaches the concept of pulling down someone's work so that you're not making changes to the live project. Then, you go through the process of switching branches and making changes in your IDE. When you are happy, you can push your changes to your feature branch and request a review in the form of a pull request. Some beginner projects were helpful in listing out this process in the readme doc.

It’s an interesting event that introduces you to what the feeling is like to contribute to open source: trying to find an open issue that nobody has yet been assigned to and that you could confidently manage on your own is harder than actually doing the contribution itself I found! I suppose when you are at this early stage of understanding, the pickings are slim and you are competing worldwide with other foreign developers all eager to prove their value. I found the process to be time consuming with a lot of back and forth. I felt anxious about pushing my changes for review if I had followed the maintainers procedure correctly. Then waiting for feedback can be quite long so you often move on to other projects.

Unless I find a project which I can personally use and where I can make useful code changes, I will focus my time on work based contributions over open source. I am perhaps not at that level where I can make meaningful code improvements. So much to learn, so little time… Hopefully I will get some Hacktoberfest swag out of this!