It was a busy October, and while I didn’t reach the Hacktoberfest goal, I did reach my personal goals (and to be honest, the sooner I abandoned Hacktoberfest the better).
The first week, I contributed to the Hiero SDK, which was a beginner friendly issue designed to help newcomers contribute for the first time. This contributing taught me how to follow a CONTRIBUTING.md, and how to set up a GPG key to sign my commits.
The second week, I contributed to 100LinesOfPythonCode, where I wrote a short 100 line text game. This was one that I wish I could do over, as it wasn’t something that furthered my goals or gained me any experience, but it allowed me to open up about my interests…
It was a busy October, and while I didn’t reach the Hacktoberfest goal, I did reach my personal goals (and to be honest, the sooner I abandoned Hacktoberfest the better).
The first week, I contributed to the Hiero SDK, which was a beginner friendly issue designed to help newcomers contribute for the first time. This contributing taught me how to follow a CONTRIBUTING.md, and how to set up a GPG key to sign my commits.
The second week, I contributed to 100LinesOfPythonCode, where I wrote a short 100 line text game. This was one that I wish I could do over, as it wasn’t something that furthered my goals or gained me any experience, but it allowed me to open up about my interests when I presented my work in class, and I gained useful insight from my professor about what I should be focusing on contributing to.
This is where I abandoned the Hacktoberfest tag and just went rogue, looking for projects on my own that I wanted to contribute to. This actually opened up the field significantly and it took me no time at all to find a brand new project called ShooterCarnival, a grass roots project aiming to create a game using the Godot game engine. This project introduced me to Godot, and the custom programming language used in it called GDScript, which was easy to pick up on as it’s very similar to Python. This was my first time contributing to a game project, and the maintainers were excited to have me and gave me a lot of great feedback.
Around this time I had my eye on the wesnoth project, and had found an issue to work on that I spent time with, researching the codebase, learning how to compile the source code into a working game file. By the time I had done all that, someone had swooped in and done the PR, one that had been sitting untouched since August. This one hurt, as it would have been a great addition to my Release 0.2, but I took it on the chin and will hopefully use the knowledge I gained to contribute to wesnoth in the future.
Finally, I turned my focus not to just contributing to a game itself, but the game engine that made it possible. After being introduced to Godot, I went straight to their github to see if there was anything I could do to contribute. Crazy enough, there was thousands of issues open, but nothing labelled for first timers. I just took on the first thing I thought I could help with, and it turned out to be an easy fix, but if it gets merged I’ll still feel incredible being able to help contribute to something this cool.
In the end, I walk away from this experience with a renewed confidence, and with an eye on several interesting projects that I plan to continue to contribute to in the future.