A look back at Hacktoberfest

While I only made a series of small changes, for Hacktoberfest, I feel that I learned a lot in the process.

I learned about the capabilities of VirtualBox, in terms of running nested VMs (no 64 bit VMs can be run inside VirtualBox VMs), and the was introduced to the use of Vagrant for virtualizing a development environment across multiple platforms, and how to get creative by stealing JSON data from live versions of code when my local version was missing data (see the blog post here).

I was also exposed to some simple things that you don't necessarily think about unless you visit an array of repositories as an outsider (previously, my use of GitHub consisted mostly of working on school projects in private repositories). I discovered that if you own a repository, there are some files that may change or be moved that you don't think about--either because you are not the primary user of the file (like CONTRIBUTING.md), or because you overlooked how a change affected the accessibility or status of other files in the repo (related post here ). By forking a repository and making some changes to the documentation files, then clicking the links to navigate to them, I formed an opinion on best practices for linking between repository documentation articles (use relative links, not absolute links as I mentioned here).

I also had my interest in coveralls and ensuring that your changes have adequate test coverage in this post. Sometimes when an organization owns a repository, that repository will be dependent on code from other repositories maintained by the same organization (although this was not quite the case here: the two repositories made similar function calls to the same external module). Coordinating code coverage, and enforcing naming and other coding conventions between multiple related repositories is a problem that merits further investigation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly I was exposed to the spirit of developing open source software. I got ambitious trying to contribute to a repository that used a language and framework I was unfamiliar with, and when I got stuck and created a pull request to get some feedback on code I was less than proud of, I was greeted with a strong sense of support and community. The repo maintainer provided some useful suggestions, and I provided me with information that helped me to learn how to move forward on an issue that I would have otherwise walked away from (this post).

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