Summary of Week 8
This week we made a decision of which open source project we are going to work on. After looking at a few projects, I narrowed it down to freeCodeCamp. Additionally, this week we were visited by Bill Reyner who spoke about how open source is being incorporated into companies like FactSet and how they profit from this. He really emphasized how, at FactSet, they try to encourage their engineers to contribute to open source projects. I thought this was pretty cool of the company because sometimes engineers want to make a difference outside of their place of work. At the same time, they might be benefiting the company in which they work by contributing to a library that their software uses, becomming a win-win situation.

My contributions for this week consisted of changing a word into a hyperlink in a peer’s blog post for week 6. They had originally intended on making the word a hyperlink but the structure in Markdown was incorrect and so the URL of the link was displayed. Also, my pull request that I created to a Hacktober project almost two weeks ago was accepted!

My progress so far with freeCodeCamp
After choosing to work on the project, freeCodeCamp, I had the option to set it up locally or to use Gitpod as the developing environment. I decided to set up the project locally on my computer because I want to get more comfortable working with projects on the command line and using git. I appreciated that the steps to set up the project were very clear and that they were explained so that you were given knowledge on what it was that you were doing and not just blindly following steps.
I am looking for issues that are labeled “first timers welcome”, “hacktoberfest”, or “help wanted” because these indicate whether they are up for grabs or whether they are good issues for getting your feet wet. There are not many issues that have the label “first timers welcome” and the ones that are labeled “hacktoberfest” are mainly for contributors who are more familiar with the project’s code. Most of the issues that I see are also already being worked on by other people. Having used the site, there are some issues that I would like to propose that would be very simple first contributions, as well as others that would be contributions to the curriculum which would take more time.