The Power of Creating Your Own Issue
I have an associate of arts in Networking and a bachelor of science degree in Network Security, but I found a lot of side jobs in web/software development that I really enjoyed. Now, I'm a full-stack software/web developer with strong proficiency in Javascript and the PERN stack. I'm having fun working on a side project at the moment, but am open to new opportunities. I'm here for learning, sharing resources, and being a part of the developer community. I'm going to share what I'm working on, my resources, and what I'm learning here. What are you working on?
During Hacktoberfest, everyone is looking for projects to work on to get credit for their pull requests. There are lots of existing issues to work on that are tagged as “good first issue”, “bug”, “feature request”, etc. But, what if you want to go beyond the existing features in the repo? What if you have a project idea that isn’t quite a full product, but might work as a feature within another repository? Or what if you find a bug that isn’t an issue yet? This is a great opportunity to create an issue.
Some participating Hacktoberfest repositories offer the option to create an issue to be assigned to yourself for Hacktoberfest pull requests. Others are not so forward about that opportunity. However, it is still an option. It’s an opportunity to contribute your innovations to a project.
Creating an issue shows initiative as a developer. It shows that you are thinking about the overall well-being of the project and that you’re thinking beyond the problems already recognized. You will be helping the other contributors and users of the project with any new functionality, features, bug fixes, design, or other types of solutions that others might not be aware were needed or wanted or haven’t been documented yet.
If you haven’t encountered an issue that you can resolve, but want to make a meaningful impact with a high-quality issue, explore the codebase, and test out some edge cases or performance issues that can help discover new issues to create and work on.
Be sure to write a well-structured issue that clearly and concisely communicates the problem or request to the maintainers and contributors. Include any important code snippets, screenshots, or other information that could help illustrate the issue more clearly. Propose a solution for the issue if you have one. You can assign yourself the issue and finish the pull request that is meaningful and has big impact.
