This weekend, I submitted my first PR for Hacktoberfest! I found Spok while digging through the featured projects; it’s a Ruby gem that checks if a particular weekday is a holiday or not. Since the creators are based in Brazil, they are asking contributors for holiday calendars from other countries to make their tool more globally responsive. I added one for my home country, the Philippines. The issue was well-documented and they also have a good contributing guide, so the process was pretty straightforward on my end. While I didn’t deal with actual code, the experience of contributing still gave me a confidence boost and makes me excited to find new projects to work on.

Update: Submitted another PR! This time, I worked on refactoring some CSS for Internet Archive’s Open Library, an online catalog that aims to collect every book ever published. I learned about CSS source order and specificity rules, and how stylelint helps keep stylesheets organized given that. I also appreciated that one of the lead developers clearly explained the issue, which made it easy for me to contribute.