In the month of October, I have participated in the Hacktoberfest as part of release 0.2. The goal was to complete 4 PRs in open source project and write blog post about the work.
Before this month, I had little or no knowledge on contributing to open source projects. I did not know many git commands. As of today, I have completed four PRs in three different open source projects and working on two more. I have learned and used several git commands and many functionalities of GitHub, used new libraries and build tools. My goal was to work on Java projects as I am trying to enhance my Java skill. In the beginning, it was overwhelming to search through different repositories and find an issue I could work on. I was looking for something familiar to me as I was kind of afraid to take on something big and not able to do it. However, now I feel more confident that I can work on bigger issues.
My PRs
I loved working on all these projects. I learned something new from each of these. However, working of PayPal/Butterfly was a bit more challenging among others. The code base is large and I had to write tests for my work.
I found open source community very welcoming, and I can learn a lot. This is just the beginning, and I am hungry to do more work on open source projects.