Hacktoberfest Review

Overall Thoughts

Overall I think hacktoberfest was a neat way to dive into the opensource community. I also found it very frustrating finding a project that I liked or could build. Since there were many times where I found a neat project but couldn't build it and didn't want to waste hours figuring out why. I also found the amount of repositories just made for hacktoberfest pull requests annoying since they would saturate the hacktoberfest tag with what I thought was not a real project, more like a collection of code. Even though all my complaining it is still my fault I didn't contribute to some projects I found interesting. I didn't leave enough time to them and greatly underestimated how long just getting something running would take. Moving forward I'll take this into consideration when I want to work on a project and give my self at least twice the amount of time I would think it would take.

Hacktoberfest PR #5

The Project

The project was the same as the last pull request, I did the same kind of fix as the last one but this time I was adding a dairy tag to all foods that had dairy in them. Most of these foods already had milk in them so I felt it was a bit redundant to add the dairy tag but since the issue was still open I thought I was still a problem. This pull request was a still larger than the last one since there were a lot of lines that needed to be changed. That being said these two last pull request were pretty simple and didn't require to understand a lot of the nitty gritty in the project, which I'm thankful for.

Hacktoberfest PR #4

The Project

This project is Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead is a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world. I was led on to this project by a fellow student who told me there was some easy fixes that I could do. My fix was just editing a recipe in a JSON according to contributors suggestions. This project was a pretty big one at 1.3 gigabytes so I didn't bother building it I just made the pull request and let their automatic build systems check it.

Hacktoberfest PR #3

Third Pull Request

I was browsing thourgh projects and while I was reading the Readme I thought I saw typo so I made a reckless pull request without creating an issue or checking with the maintainers. This led to the pull request being closed because the issue I thought I found was actually not an issue. I learned that even the process of looking through issues/making issues and communication is a vital part of open source and I can't just drop what I think are fixes willy nilly.

Hacktoberfest PR #2

The Project

For my second pull request I just wanted to do a quick and easy fix. I had enough of cloning projects, builds failing, dependencies missing and just decided how about we update a README that sounds like it can be done without install 100000000 files. So I searched around and found the repository for HandBrake, HandBrake is an opensource video transcoder. Their main page had a docs repository which seemed just like the place to look.

Issue

It was actually quite easy finding an issue. It seems like this repo didn't have too much activity and the newest issue a month old. Conveniently the newest issue also didn't have anyone actively working on it so I decided to take a stab at it. It was just two misspelling fixes, created a pull request and that was it.

Conclusion

Even thought this pull request is pretty small I still feel a sense of accomplishment. Handbrake is a widely used tool and its nice to contribute to a larger project.

Hacktoberfest PR #1

First Impressions

Honestly I was excited about hacktoberfest when I first heard about it, I thought it would be full of huge opensource projects and bugs on stuff I use every day, except I found most of the hacktoberfest labeled issues are more of collections of code like a list of nice words or a set of algorithms in different languages. This made searching for actual projects tedious since there was a lot of these kinds of projects making issues but eventually I found a project that struck my interest.

Project

This project was a game engine written in c++ then a python wrapper is put on it so it can be used in python. I found this project captivating since it used combined two languages that I'm interested in. The game engine seemed to be in a primitive but working state. But more I read into the code the more it became confusing, it used a lot of strange calculations and an enormous amount of OpenGL functions which I couldn't understand. I kind of gave up on it since it seemed like a never ending rabbit hole of code. Except I couldn't stop thinking about it, I guess even if I didn't understand the code I still found it interesting.

Issue

At the time I was choosing an issue there was only two open and one of them was already being work on so I was left to do this one. Although I had no understanding of OpenGL or how texture rendering even worked I chipped away at it for a few days, looking at each function call, traversing files just to find some clue on how I could implement the fix. I found the line that used an image from file and the line that loaded it. All I had to do was change that and be done. So I messed around with it and got it working! Even I was surprised when it started showing different a image. This victory was bittersweet because after I changed the loaded image I couldn't find a way to specify that image in the python constructor. Thankfully it was pointed out that the python constructor wasn't in the scope of my pull request so I was in the clear. I put up my pr and that was it.

Pull Request

The project owner brought up some valid criticism in my pull request. I was loading the texture from file every frame which would cause additional lag and I could just have the image stored in a object group since it is being used by every object in that group. I made these changes and then tragedy struck... The pretty colors from the pictures weren't being shown anymore. It seemed like if the image wasn't being loaded right before it was being used, it would get corrupted somewhere along the line. I set sail back into the sea of code and tried to find out why this was but I just couldn't. I replied to the project owners comment telling him my problem seeing if he could find out why this was happening but as of righting this he has not yet replied.

Conclusion

I learned a bit about OpenGL and some game engine logic. I am still interested in this project but as of now it is unclear whether or not I will be worth the time investment and stress trying to contribute to this project. Overall even though it sounds like I had a terrible experience I actually enjoyed sifting through code and finally finding a nugget of gold only to find out it was fools gold.