Hacktoberfest and Confidence
5 Oct 2019
It's the most wonderful time of the year? Maybe, haha! Time again for Hacktoberfest and at the same time for me Preptober for Nanowrimo, which is next month. Oh boy, do I love projects. For Hacktoberfest though, I'm not quite sure what kind of projects I want to contribute to. I know I want to go to my local Open Source meetup and go to their Hacktoberfest presentation. It's fun to see the possibilities that are there for contributions.
This year will be my second Hacktoberfest and I couldn't be more excited. I'm of course listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos for inspiration and guidance, but like last year I am apprehensive about actually participating. I think that comes down to me only working on my own things throughout the year. And not really committing to GitHub on top of that. (I have to get better at that!)
On top of the Open Source meetup I also want to go to more meetups in general. I know there are awesome people there that love to help out people who need a little guidance, but too often than not I let my shyness get the best of me. I have this nagging need to not be a bother to anyone, but I know to get anywhere with code I MUST ask questions. There a ton of resources available to me, one being the awesome Slack channel from my boot camp that I am still a part of and well, as mentioned before, the wonderful people at meetups who want to help those who need help.
I think I get stuck on wanting to do coding challenges rather than actually building something, so the prospect of adding to an existing project feels daunting. I desperately don't want to break anything! But then I remind myself, that's why these are pull requests. If I put in a pull request and they choose to put it in their project and it breaks something...well it is their project. That, however, doesn’t mean I won't try my hardest not to break something!
I still need to research if this is a thing, but I would love it if I could do a pull request involving Postgres since that's what we use at work. I want to get better at it! We have pre-built scripts that we can run to get the information we need, but whenever I need to write something myself I freeze. Here’s to more learning and applying my knowledge this month!