This year was my first time participating in the online Hacktoberfest event.
I often use code from GitHub and occasionally publish my own projects there but I realised I rarely contribute to other people’s code. Hearing people talking about the event on the Ladybug Podcast, I was inspired to make a small pull request. The boost I got from something so insignificant being merged lead me to look through my favourite projects’ issue lists to see if there was a bug I could fix or a missing feature I could implement.
The hub tool integrates GitHub features into the git commandline tool, I’ve mentioned it in a previous post about automating pull requests, and I found 2 ways to help out:
- Extending a regular expression to strip unneeded text when generating PR descriptions from commit messages
- Adding shell completions for bash, which involved me having to read up a lot and learn how to write bash completion scripts
The trello library provides a simple JavaScript client for the Trello API, it has common use cases already implemented and anything else is implemented with pull requests on demand so I helped out by:
- Implementing an API call which someone had asked for in the project issues
- Fixing the Travis CI config so that it doesn’t need to be tweaked every few years; ironically last updated by myself
It feels really good that I could contribute back tools I use in my own projects. A colleague of mine took part too and hopefully next year it’ll be more than just the two of us!