First, I want to start off by very quickly summarizing what I worked on during Hacktoberfest
- write HelloWorld program is Rust
- write a program in C++ to reverse a string using a stack
- add a JSON object to a React application
- create a form to capture user infomation in a Node.js application
- create a database and connect to it for same application as issue 4
My Experience – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This experience was interesting to say the least, I learned how to utilize the skills which I learned in my classes and use them in “real life” scenarios. Even though this was an assignment assigned in class for marks, it did not feel like it was.
To start off with the good, looking back at the issues I tackled, I can see that each experience was unique as each issue required me to use a different programming skill. What I mean from this is that I used 4 different programming languages ( Rust, C++, HTML, JavaScript ) of which one was a new to me and one where I created a database and another in which I created a object that could be stored into database. Thus, I got to develop each skill with a new issue.
What I feel I could have done better during this experience is not giving up quickly on something I couldn’t solve. I should have reached out within my own community of peers on Slack for help, but decided to give up instead. I feel next time I will try harder and reach out more. I felt intimidated by looking at the amazing work others have done in my class and in comparison feel like a “noob”. So I decided to stop comparing myself to others and I learned to be more confident in my skills by taking baby steps in the projects worked on. I hope to continue these little steps and participate in Hacktoberfest next year and contribute to the larger projects talked about in class such as different editors or browsers.
With Hacktoberfest in general, I feel people should get penalized for working on claimed bugs. It was extremely annoying working on something that was taken away from me, on multiple occasions, one of which I still continued to work on ( and included in my pull requests ). Other than that, I feel like I would try this again next year!
ShreenasOpenSource 