https://meetgor.com Posts tagged with open-source en-us Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:43:20 UTC https://meetgor.com/posts/hacktoberfest-2021 Introduction This was my second year as a Hacktoberfest participant, First year was very dry and not so exciting as this turned out to be a cracker of an experi Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 UTC ## Introduction This was my second year as a Hacktoberfest participant, First year was very dry and not so exciting as this turned out to be a cracker of an experience. With more than month gone in with only a few contributions, the second half of October was a splendid one for me where I made a lot more than in entire 2 years. This is my Contributions so far in this month:  ## Maintaining the Momentum Since the beginning of September, I started to contribute to open-source little by little so as to really progress my way into learning new stuff and networking with more people. I also had Hacktoberfest in my mind and so I started with simple issues and got a different perspective of Open-source as it is another way to do things pretty quickly and feeling of getting things done for someone else as a community work. Finding Issues perfect for you is hard but shaping yourself with the requirements for the issue is what you can achieve over a period of time. So I basically had some 5-6 pull requests merged in some Repositories, I don't trust numbers when it comes to open-source as it might be some `documentation changes`, `branch name changes`, `translations`, etc. This might not be the best contribution I could have made but breaking the ice was an important step, for that I bought my expectations down to contribute to big organizations and projects and started sifting some doable issues. Since then, Hacktoberfest was around the corner and it just carried the momentum of my open-source contribution further. ## Getting the hang of Open Source So, till mid-October, I just had 2 pull requests with only 1 merged. I was out of town for a week and had some college projects to be completed so I couldn't catch up with the contributions but after a few days of getting back on a regular schedule, I was able to submit half a dozen of PRs in a week (all merged). One of them was from the official `Jekyll` repository :) I was pretty much elated with that contribution though it was only about adding 4-5 lines of documentation, it was something that can be useful for people as it was for me and it was not previously there in the official docs. You will say, is open-source about merging PRs? No, it's not especially the `hacktoberfest` labeled ones. I have contributed to only 5 projects with hacktoberfest accepted label others were the stuff which I personally liked and wanted to genuinely contribute to. I also would like to address some issues and things which are not in the spirit of Open source, firstly **most of the issues with hacktoberfest accepted labels are from front end, so trivial, self-assigned. I understand it's meant for beginners but it's not only for beginners or is it? I might be wrong here.** Still, the maintainers need to up the standards a bit for equal opportunity for everyone to contribute with the spirit of open source. I wanted to be a maintainer this year but didn't feel much confident about it. It can be a challenge for maintainers as well to fetch attention and come up with good issues and projects. That's a thought for another year until then I will be a happy contributor. > ### Hacktoberfest is only about Open Source but Open source is not only about Hacktoberfest Well, Hacktoberfest is about open-source right? But Open source is not only about Hacktoberfest, like just contributing to getting 4 PRs merged and just forgetting open source because it was mentioned so(also get some Swags). This was my mistake last year :( I just didn't touch open-source after Hacktoberfest. This year I would definitely not repeat the mistake and continue providing value and gain more experience. ## What were my learnings I learned some skills that I might not have otherwise thought about learning. Understanding `Svelte`, `Github Actions` for `Go` lang, leveraging `Django` and `Bash` skills were some of my key takeaways from this year of Hacktoberfest. This is too much for me compared to the previous year in which I just used some `C++` and `Bash` to create an Algorithm or function. How stupid of me for contributing to that kind of project and pulling up 4 PRs for that, though I was a beginner and have come too far from making that mistake again. Thanks to everyone who gave me a chance to contribute. Let's see my top 4 contributions as per my opinion: - [Created a ripple effect button as a `Svelte` component](https://github.com/Ananto30/golpo-svelte/pull/14) - [Created a BASH script to convert a pip list to freeze format output](https://github.com/soumya997/Listreqs/pull/2) - [Added `GitHub` Actions workflow for linting in `go`](https://github.com/julien-bouquet/geo-api/pull/18) - [Additional Documentation for running Jekyll local](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/pull/8852) ## What's next in Open Source for me I'll continue to sort and pick up some issues in my spare time and try to learn something that I have never worked with or am too excited to work on. I have a lot of plans for some Open source projects of existing applications and would like to make them from the ground up. Some of the things I'm looking for in open source next: - Open-source alternative to existing projects/apps - Any new application/project - Automation of tasks (using Python/BASH) - Writing documentation for existing projects Don't take my word for it, you'll see it in action soon(probably in 2022) XD. Until then it's about learning and documenting the process. ## Conclusion So, it's almost Halloween with Diwali around the corner and sadly an end-of-a-month-long celebration of Open source. Though you can anytime contribute to open source this is a month you can do more than just open source. This year for me was an absolute delight and definitely improved from the horrendous previous experiences. The things I spent time learning in lock-down when there was no result/reward for the effort, are finally getting rewarded, and am much confident than I ever was. Hopefully, you have not read the entire article but that's fine unless you have taken time to read it. Thank you for being here. Until then Happy Coding :) posts https://meetgor.com/posts/find-filter-github-issues Introduction Are you stuck in finding an open-source project to contribute to? We will see how you can pick up an issue on GitHub appropriate as per your prefer Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 UTC ## Introduction Are you stuck in finding an open-source project to contribute to? We will see how you can pick up an issue on GitHub appropriate as per your preferences of languages, labels, complexity, and thus you can find a Community or a project to work and continue with further contributions. This process might not be as efficient but is quite helpful for beginners or people getting started to contributing to Open Source. ## Understand the search bar I assume you have your GitHub account already created. If not go ahead at [Github](https://github.com/join) and create one. On the Home page, you can easily navigate to the `Issues` tab and you will see something like this:  Now, you won't find any issues if you haven't created any. But if you look at the search bar, you will find the reason why it is empty or why there are only the issues that you have created. You will see that in the search bar there is a filter called `author:Username`, which filters the issues which are created by you. You definitely don't want this as you want to search and find other issues by other people/communities. So, simply remove the text `author:Username` from the search bar. Keep rest as it is for now. Now if you press enter after removing the author filter, you will see all the issues on GitHub.  There will be a ton of them, very random in terms of programming languages, frameworks, projects, difficulty, type, etc. they are basically the issues created recently on GitHub. In the next section, we will see how to filter those issues as per the programming languages/tools to which you might like to contribute to. ## Add languages We can add filters to the issues as `language:name`, this will filter all the Issues which have the languages in their codebase. For Example:  Here, I have filtered the issues which have language as `python`, you can use any language/tool you might want and would love to find some interesting projects to contribute and learn from. If you want to search by multiple programming languages you can separate the names of those programming languages by a comma `,`. You can also separate programming languages with space and enclosing all of them under double quotes `""`. For Example: Let's search for issues with C, C++, and Java as their programming languages, we can use `language:c,cpp,java` or `language:"c cpp java"` The above filter will give out all the issues which are created from programming languages either C/C++/Java. You can find more filter options on the [GitHub docs](https://docs.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-on-github/searching-on-github/searching-issues-and-pull-requests). ## Add labels You can find issues as per labels marked on them, many issues have a label marked on them to improve their visibility and meta-information about the issue. We have some labels which GitHub has created already for common scenarios in projects. 1. `bug` 2. `documentation` 3. `duplicate` 4. `enhancement` 5. `good first Issue` 6. `help wanted` 7. `invalid` 8. `question` 9. `wontfix` We can even create our own labels by providing the label name and a description. To search for labels, you can use `label:name of the label`. You can any of the above 9 label tags or any other tag name that you think is popular other than those 9. You would have to use double quotes (`""`) to add certain labels with multiple words like `good first issue` or `help wanted`. For example: If you search for `label:"good first issue"`, you will get all of the issues(newest first) which have a label `good first issues` tagged on them. Similarly, for multiple issues, you can add comma-separated labels as well. Just like `label:bug,"good first issue"` will search for either `bug`, `good first issue` or both.  ## More Sorting Options In the rightmost part of the search bar, in the Sort button, you can click on there and find a couple of options like: `newest`, `oldest`, `least commented`, `recently updated`, and so on. If you click on any of them you will see the changes reflected on the list of issues as well as the search bar.  **After this the stage is yours, you can look at any issue and Understand its objective, then ask yourself can you solve this issue? If yes then read the contribution guidelines, and the rest is sheer skills like git, programming, documentation, etc.** ## Conclusion Now you can go ahead and start applying the filters on issues and make some contributions to Open-Source on GitHub. We covered some methods and tricks to find and filter out the issues on GitHub based on the programming languages/tools and the labels attached to them. This technique can be good for beginners as well as people who want to find quick issues to solve. Feel free to explore and try out different filters and find the issue you are confident to work on. Good Luck! Happy Coding :) posts