This year was my first time participating in hacktoberfest fest programme. I heard about it in the previous years but I wasn't sure I was ready. So this year, I decided to give it a try. I was nervous at first, but then I took tips and instructions from the website and read through the contribution guidelines of repositories before trying to make any contributions. It was really an amazing feeling having my contributions accepted - because it turned out contributing to open source wasn't as hard as I thought.
I contributed to a problem solving repository where you solve some algorithms in any language of your choice. I solved the palindrome, fibonacci series and ugly number algorithms using JavaScript.
What I learnt contributing to the repository was that I had to cover all use cases and make my code as readable as possible (adding comments where necessary most importantly) to enable understanding to anyone who has access to it.
Any user of the project can use and implement it where necessary in his/her codebase and make additions or subtractions where necessary.
Overall, this year's hacktoberfest programme was a very exciting one for me and opened my eyes to the benefits of contributing to open source. I hope to contribute to repositories tackling real-life problems very soon.
Feel free to send in comments with your personal experiences. Cheers!!