I do open-source most of my projects, but saying I contribute to open-source projects that aren’t mine would be a stretch. So I decided to contribute to some projects this month.

For those of you wondering what Hacktoberfest is, it is a month-long celebration of open source by DigitalOcean

I chose to contribute to some documentation and code. The code was mostly minor improvements and security updates while my documentation contribution was to Chakra UI.

When I decided to contribute to the Chakra UI docs, I assumed it would be easy to get them up and running. But boy oh boy was I wrong. It took me just 5 whole minutes to clone the repository, and another 5 minutes after two failed attempts to install the dependencies. The contribution guide also mentioned about issues on windows, which I obviously ignored. The project had around 800 files.

It was painful to run it. Every change in the markdown meant a full server restart and each restart would take at least 1 minute. After which examples would take another minute to load. Remember that issue on windows I ignored? Well, I shouldn’t have, cause it prevented the proper functioning of hot reload on Windows.

• Never contribute to big codebases. Big codebases are really good for learning stuff

• I should fix possible issues beforehand

• Buy a better PC

• Shouldn’t have ignored warnings

• Should’ve googled more