On a personal level, I felt unsatisfied for starting Hacktoberfest now because I made a vow to myself at the beginning of the month to start strong and early. One of the reasons why I started late because I did not know what I want to work on. I feel that to randomly select something from GitHub would not fit my way of working, so I keep delaying it. However, I had something in mind to which I wanted to contribute. It is called Telescope, an open source tool for aggregating blog feeds developed at Seneca College.
There are a few reasons why I would like to be part of this project. First, it uses the technologies that I know well and want to improve on including React, JavaScript and Docker. Second, the maintainers are active and quickly respond to your comments. This proves to be important because you want to quickly hear their feedbacks about your contribution to continue improving. Third, Judging from the current states of it, I want to make it better using what I know and grow with it.
Until this morning, I was trying to get it work on my local machine following the docs. Unluckily, I could not get it running and decided to reach out to maintainers to ask for help. Thanks to my problem, they decided that they need to improve the docs to better navigate new contributors through the app. While trying to solve an issue, I have created another issue for the project. And that’s how it works in real-world open source development.
My first pick to contribute is to update the docs with new information. The maintainers asked someone to update their color palette docs and I thought for myself that this could be an easy start. I commented on issue-1179 and started working on it.
It took me about half an hour to create a new doc, and I got to review markdown syntax and learned a few extra tricks from the old docs. The maintainers quickly reviewed my PR and merged my PR. First merge was a success . Here is the new docs I created now merged to master.
My second PR was more about coding…well not exactly but I did improve the UI a bit. The maintainers wanted to fix the issue with extra padding on the side for post while on mobile view. This issue apparently happened after pushing of a commit. The challenge I had when trying to fix this issue was to get myself familiar with how they developed the UI and applied styling. After debugging through dev tool and learning about the app’s React components, I found where it went wrong. In Posts component, the developer wrap everything inside a Container component without any class assigned to it. Because a Container has a default side padding in its code, it you do not overwrite it, the default padding would be applied. I simply fixed it by giving it a class name of “classes.root” and the padding got removed.
The second PR quickly got merged by the maintainers as well. They were responsive despite this weekend was the thanksgiving weekend. Kudos to them!
That’s it forks! I’m amazed how long my post have become. I thought it would be a short one as my two PRs targeted very small issues. Hopefully, the next two PRs, I would be able to ship more codes now that I feel more confident.
Thank you for reading!
Tony Vu
