It's the end of the first week of my first time as an official Hacktoberfest participant!
There have been many ups and downs this week, and I thought I'd summarize them here so that others can see what the experience of a first-timer is like.
So without further adieu, let's go back to Monday and my first (FAILED 😅) attempt at a pull request for Hacktoberfest!
Lesson Learned
I've forked projects before on GitHub, but I wanted to brush up on my skills before October came around so that I could be extra prepared for Hacktoberfest. But as it so often happens, September got away from me. Still, I was excited to create my first PR on a pretty simple project. I chose to make some edits to a README file for a Memory Card game built in JavaScript. Sounds easy, right? For my first project, I didn't want to commit to too much, plus I already felt confident working with Markdown and HTML, both of which I'd need for the edits.
I worked on the file, committed my changes, and made my pull request within the span of 30 minutes. I was feeling pretty confident until I loaded up my Hacktoberfest profile page and saw this...
Yep, as it turns out, I had totally missed merging the changes from my fork into the main project branch. No wonder it says Project not participating!
Luckily, I was able to quickly rectify this but it was a humbling experience for sure. I started to majorly doubt myself. Maybe I wasn't cut out for Hacktoberfest after all? After a pep talk from a family member, I spent that evening reading everything I could find on making top-notch pull requests so that I could feel more confident going forward.
The README file I worked on for my first successful pull request.
Trying Something New
As a Unity game developer, I knew there wasn't going to be a lot out there that utilized the skills I had. I do know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fairly well, but they're definitely not the languages I feel most comfortable using.
I am very familiar with C#, but only in the context of Unity. So I challenged myself to find a C# project where I could use the language I knew best, but in the context of a console app.
I stumbled across the perfect project on my second day of Hacktoberfest. This was a repo of command-line games built in various languages such as C, C++ and Python. There was no C# category on the repo yet, but the guidelines encouraged contributors to add new categories as they saw fit. I forked the project and got to work building my very first console app using C#.
After reading a few different tutorials, I realized that a lot of my coding knowledge from Unity would transfer pretty seamlessly to my app. I decided to use some game logic I had learned from a beginner project in a course by GameDev.tv (PS. I highly recommend this learning platform if you are interested in learning game development).
The C# command-line game I wrote for my second pull request.
It took a couple days of on and off work, but I finished and submitted my console app last night. Success! While I was working on this one, I'd also begun contributing some NPC quotes to a large database for another Unity game. So pull request #3 was already well in hand.
A library of NPC quotes I contributed to for my third pull request. Can anyone guess which game I took these quotes from? 😀
This morning, I woke up to find that all three of my successful pull requests were now in the 'maturing' period. And I think I already have my next project lined up for pull request #4...
Unity games galore
As it turns out, I was able to find a few high-quality Unity games to contribute to for Hacktoberfest, and I couldn't be happier. I'm currently working on adding a level to a mobile ball launcher game and a start screen to an Angry Bird clone. These pull requests will be a little more time intensive so I won't be able to finish them until the weekend or early next week. But I'm excited to be able to dive in and work on contributing to a game using the platform I love most: Unity.
A 2D Unity game I'm hoping to contribute to for my fourth pull request!
Now it's your turn: tell me about your first week doing Hacktoberfest! What projects did you work on? Any lessons learned?