Hey Everyone 👋, I am here to be sharing my Journey of Hacktoberfest through my first blog. So, Hacktoberfest is a month-long challenge of Open Source Contributions to help everyone to get started with Open Source. Whether it's our 1st time or 8th time everyone is welcome. So, in August '22 I started my Open Source journey by adding my name and other details to the Hacktoberfest practice repository. It pushed me towards my open-source journey. Then I make some small contributions to other repositories. This was my first time at Hacktoberfest and I didn't know about the challenge before. Then I took some guidance and refer some resources regarding what is Hacktoberfest Challenge and what is the criteria are to complete the challenge 🤔.

One thing I can share with all of you is that tech communities play an important role in supporting beginners who are new to a particular tech stack or open source. People in the community are very much helpful and provide content and resources for beginners like I was. Some communities that helped me along my journey are Eddiehub Community, Community Classroom, SuperContributors and also Hacktoberfest Community.

So, I started Contributing to beginner-friendly repositories in October for the Hacktoberfest Challenge. After 2-3 days I got the mail from Hacktoberfest that "Congratulations, your first Pull Request has been merged by the maintainer. Wait till Hacktoberfest accepts it". I got so excited that my first PR of Hacktoberfest has been merged. But, to be honest it was excluded by Hacktoberfest 😭. Because it doesn't fit the criteria of the Hacktoberfest Challenge.

After that, I started raising Pull Requests on the beginner-friendly repositories. Some maintainers assigned the issues to me and some didn't even reply to me. Of course, maintainers are busy and it's not easy to be maintainers.

The criteria to complete the Hacktoberfest Challenge is to make four Pull Requests merged from the maintainer and also to be accepted by Hacktoberfest. Everyone must make more than four Pull Requests as we don't know which Pull Request can be deleted or excluded by Hacktoberfest.

Finally, on 23rd Oct, I received a mail from Hacktoberfest that your four Pull Request has been accepted by Hacktoberfest which are under the Hacktoberfest criteria and I am eligible for swags now. The swag can be a T-shirt by Hacktoberfest or they can plant a tree in my name. I choose T-shirt this time.

Overall it was a wonderful journey at Hacktoberfest where I made a total of 9 Pull Requests that are accepted by Hacktoberfest. In this journey, I Networked with so many people from different tech communities but with the same motto to provide valuable content and help others in any tech stack or open source contributions.

I would like to thank Hacktoberfest for this amazing challenge to help beginners contribute to open source and the tech communities. Open source not only helps you in your tech skills but also helps you to improve your soft skills like communication and collaboration. I would suggest everyone should start open source contributions from today itself. It's not related to coding only. There are many low-code or non-code contributions which everyone can do.

I heard this quote recently from the Github UNIVERSE '22 event that might help everyone "World depends on open source and Open Source depends on you".

Thank you for reading and have a great day ahead 😊