Hello all!

I'd like to walk you through my initial thoughts as a first timeHacktoberfest participant.

For those that don't know what Hacktoberfest is, it is anannual event hosted by DigitalOcean during the month of October that encourages people around the world to interact withopen source projects.

People can interact withopen source projects in many ways, as either acontributor or amaintainer of a project.

For me, I am focused oncontributing to open source projects and this is really nice becauseHacktoberfest gives myself and other contributors a clear goal to achieve as a contributor.

By the end of October (and by extension, Hacktoberfest), I need to submitfour high quality pull requests such that they getmerged into another person's/organization's repository. If I am successful with my four contributions, I will get a digital badge that represents my ability to make four successful contributions:

Some of the pull requests I have submitted have already been merged and are now waiting to be processed byHacktoberfest to see if they are valid:

Myfirst pull request that was merged was one that I did for my friend, Vinh on his repository called,barrierless. For more details on mypull request and my process of contributing to Vinh's repository, you can read my otherblog, since it was quite an involved process.

However, what I want to highlight is that pull requests can come in all different forms and sizes. As such, I don't want to highlight a pull request like this for those that are intimidated to contributing to open source projects and/or Hacktoberfest.

As such, let me show you mysecond pull request, which is many times more simple than what I did for Vinh, where I fixed a simple spelling mistake.

See? This wasn't too hard of a thing to change! However, as someone who is trying to grow as an open source developer, I'm aiming to do much more than fix one or two spelling mistakes for my pull requests.

Going forward, I plan on sifting through many moreREADME.md files and attempting to run said projects byfollowing their pre-existing instructions.

If those instructions work fine, then great! I will try to understand the codebase before trying to work on any existing issues that repository might have.

If I can't run a project's code based on their instructions, I will takes that as an opportunity to perhaps, offer suggestion on improving the repository's documentation.

Now, for my final thoughts.

For those that have found repositories to contribute to, but are worried that your pull requests won't count because the repository you're interested in hasn't added one of the following:

1. TheHacktoberfest topic on the repository

1. TheHacktoberfest-Accepted label on the issue

1. TheHacktoberfest-Accepted label on your pull request

My greatest advice to you isjust ask!

You canalways ask the maintainer of a project to add any of thoseHacktoberfest related features to their repository such that your pull request contribution counts. People are friendlier than you think! I encourage you to reach out with the maintainers of projects and build a rapport with them since they're human, just like you.

And with that said I bid you, adieu!