Hacktoberfest Conclusions

My first PR was merged successfully and the number from contributors increased from 3 to 8 since my PR. This repo pretty much died off since the maintainer hasn’t been very for a few weeks.

My second PR was also merged successfully. I had a positive interaction with the repo owner but the repo is also kinda dead.

My third PR was not merged or commented on which is disappointing because it was fairly active before I made the pull request. I think the owner got tired of checking all the PRs for the repo. It was a fun little project.

My fourth PR was not merged but I got a lot of feedback and was updated on the situation of my pull request. I decided to make an attempt at a big project since the other ones were very small and I wouldn’t want to put them on my resume. Based on an issue submitted in the create-react-app repo, there were bit.ly links that were dead links so I created new bit.ly links that lead to the correct document pages. One of the reviewers said we should use the actual URLs instead so I quickly made a pull request with the changes. However, literally a few seconds after I submitted my new commit, another reviewer said “We have a new domain name that we’re going to be using for shortlinks. We’re just waiting on Facebook Open Source to set up the DNS for it. This also doesn’t solve the problem for existing apps that contain the broken link. ” . I wrote back hoping that once they have the new DNS set up and have the shortlinks that they would let me add the new links to the files. It was pretty cool to see that there were multiple maintainers around to review my code. My code didn’t pass some of the tests the second time, probably because I didn’t pull from the upstream and my code was out of date.

Throughout this month, I did end up trying to learn a new framework (Ember js) and it definitely didn’t click with me. I don’t know if it was too slow or the learning curve was difficult but I felt could do whatever I needed to do in Vue/React with less hassle and it was just easier to understand and read in Vue/React.

Now that I have more time for each PR instead of having to do one once a week, I’ll be more patient when trying to setup environments for more complicated projects.