Introduction

I'm Juanita, a passionate undergrad who is exploring open-source and learning while doing. This was my second Hacktoberfest and was filled with learnings. Got to work on some amazing projects and learnt something new which was fun!
You can checkout my Github here ->https://github.com/JuanitaCathy

Journey Throughout

This Hacktoberfest was certainly filled with many highs and lows, one of the lows being me struggling to find a repository to contribute to. Initially, as I wasn't well aware of the trending tech, I found it hard to get hold of a repository to contribute to. However, when I found a repository which somewhat aligned to what I wanted to do, I went through their codebase and learnt some basic stuff and contributed with what I learnt.

I was learning by doing and this was helpful as it wasn't just a one-time thing and will help me in a long run. I started with basic contributions like python scripts and went on to go abit advance. This was a massive boost in confidence as well which is nice. It was a nice experience and the maintainers of the repository I contributed to were also pretty chill which further enhanced the experience.

Growth

When I started out with Hacktoberfest, I wasn't sure if I could apply my theoretical knowledge of a specific language for real-world applications. However, with me learning things on the go and applying them made me more confident and strong with my foundations.

I initially knew only Python, however, there was this one contribution where I had to add Poetry support and that was a really big confidence boost once I finished as when I started out, I had no clue what Poetry was. For now, I'm having fun learning and creating an impact through open-source. Hacktoberfest 2023 really is my inflection point and I love it.