Finish Celebrating Hacktoberfest 2022 by contributing to Reactify

Introduction.

It’s been another amazing October of Hacktoberfest. With only about 9 days to go, Hackotberfest 2022 is still way from coming to an end – there’s still enough time for you to increase your impact in the opensource ecosystem through this awesome opensource festival, or at least for you to get started if you haven’t.

If are yet to get started with hacktoberfest 2022, below are some relevant links to help you.

A project to help you celebrate Hacktoberfest 2022.

In case you need a project to quickly get started in Hacktoberfest 2022? I've got you covered with Reactify.

https://github.com/Okpainmo/Reactify

Reactify, is an opensource blog project that is open to different categories of contributors. It is open to contributions from writers/technical-writers and developers. This is greatly in line with the goal of Hacktoberfest 2022 – to promote low/no-code contributions.

About Reactify.

Reactify is primarily a project(an opensource blog) that is meant to help people learn some web development technologies that I have come to love. Like the name of the project already states, the first of such amazing web development technologies, is ReactJs.

Reactify is a project that I built to primarily help people learn ReactJs and NextJs in a way that helps them optimize the learning process. Although the main themes of Reactify are ReactJs and NextJs, I added some extras to the mix.

How it all started.

In my last blog post, I completed a series-tutorial in which I showed how to build a complete blog with NextJs, tailwindCSS, and Contentful CMS. In the post, I stated that I was going to scale the blog project into an awesome resource for learning ReactJs and NextJs. Even though the idea of how to come around with Reactify was not totally clear by then, Reactify is what I was talking about – now it’s here.

Since it is an opensource project, it surely won’t be a bad idea to have a section dedicated to helping people learn about opensource – so I added an opensource category.

The final category(to make it four), which is currently present on Reactify, is a category dedicated to helping people get started with CMS by learning how to use Contentful CMS. I must admit that I fell in love with Contentful CMS after discovery all the amazing features it had to offer users and developers.

To me, contentful is so amazing to the point that I believe its superpowers are still hidden “in the woods” - to an extent, from the frontline developer ecosystem. Hence I thought it wise to add a category in Reactify where technical writers will be able to contribute technical articles showing how they use Contentful CMS with either ReactJs or NextJs.

Adding Contentful CMS to the mix, is part of a developer advocacy commitment that I decided to offer Contentful.

My dream React blog.

I’ve been thinking about creating a ReactJs blog for some time now – a blog that will be dedicated to just ReactJs things. Reactify is actually a perfect actualization of that dream. It’s even better as an opensource project because I won’t have to spend months populating the blog with contents all by myself.

Together we’ll do “Ubuntu”

The following conditions about the Reactify blog should be clearly noted:

Only a TLDR – a brief summary of each published article will be added to the Reactify blog. This will help to increase contribution-interest from technical writers. As part of Reactify’s policy, a link to the originally published article will be added in each post to lead back to the main published article on the author’s blog. This way, readers get to catch a glimpse of what each article is all about before clicking to read the full article. Also, we all get to promote the original blogs of every loyal Reactify contributor.

TLDR stands for “too-long-didn’t-read”

The extra page loading time to read a TLDR before heading to the main article is no worries at all, because the Reactify-blog is built with NextJs’ amazing Static Site Generation(SSG) pre-rendering technique, which makes dynamic(API related/data fetching) pages to load like static pages – Thanks to build-time pre-rendering.

Every technical article to be contributed to the project, remains the complete property of their respective owners. Reactify claims NO ownership right on any contributed technical article.

As revealed just above, Reactify, is not just an opensource project that will sit on a GitHub repository, It is actually an opensource blog too.

Here is a link, explore the Reactify blog to see for yourself.

I guess it would be impressive to know that the Reactify blog is built WITHOUT a single line of backend code because its backend is powered by Contentful CMS. I believe this reason is also another very good reason to have added Contentful CMS as a category on Reactify.

How Reactify contributions work.

the Reactify project repository contains 6 branches.

The “main” branch which serves as an introductory page to help contributors get along with the project.
The “reactify-reactjs” branch - for contributing ReactJs technical articles, and making other related contributions.
The “reactify-nextjs” branch - for contributing NextJs technical articles, and making other related contributions.
The “reactify-opensource” branch - for contributing opensource related articles, and making other related contributions.
The “reactify-contentful” branch - for contributing Contentful CMS technical articles, and making other related contributions.
The “reactify-blog” branch/project core: This branch will contain the Reactify blog. This is the most delicate and important branch on the project. It will contain the Reactify blog project(source code and everything).

There are basically three(3) ways to contribute to the Reactify project.

By contributing/submitting details about relevant technical articles to any of the four categories available on the Reactify blog. This can be done by using the README file available on the related branch of the repository. The contributed article will then be published on the Reactify blog using all the submitted details of the article.

After submitting the details of the article on the related branch of the Reactify Github repository, you will need to fill out this form with all requested details of the article as well. You will need to submit a banner/image for the post - to be added on the Reactify blog.

By contributing to the Reactify blog(the project-core codebase/github branch).
By making other relevant contributions to any of the 6 branches available on the project.

Such contributions can include:

Improving the README file of any of the 6 branches.
Making other contributions like adding a CONTRIBUTING file to any branch on which it is missing and etcetera.

Contributing to the Reactify project just as every other opensource project, is made easy by simply sticking to the requirements of any issue you pick and choose to handle.

In all your contributions, always do well to remember all three Hacktoberfest 2022 core values:

Everyone is welcome
Quantity is fun, quality is fun
Short-term action, long-term impact

Contributing technical articles to Reactify.

With the four categories(ReactJs, NextJs, Getting started with opensource, and Contentful CMS) on the Reactify blog, technical writers can contribute their related articles - whether already written ones or the ones they wish to write after picking a “topic issue” from the Reactify GitHub repository. Those articles will be published on the blog after they have contributed the article details to the GitHub repository.

Contributing articles to Reactify is the primary but second most important means of contributing to the project.

Contributions of articles to the blog are not random, Reactify is a project that is created to carefully curate or gather top-notch content from different authors. Hence article topics to be contributed to any of the 4 categories, will be clearly stated out as issues(“topic-issues”) in the Reactify GitHub repository.

Contributing a technical article to the Reactify project, involve these four(4) steps.

Pick a topic(“topic issue”) from the list of issues present on the Reactify GitHub repository.
Write on the selected topic (that is if you have not written an article on that topic before – previously published articles can be contributed)
Add the details of the articles to the README file of the related branch on the Reactify GitHub repository.

The details about each article to be added to the README file of the related branch are:

The article topic/title.
The author name.
The URL to the post on the author’s blog.
The URL to the github repository of the code/project aspect of the article.
A TLDR: a brief summary of what the article is all about.

Finally you’ll need to submit all required details of the article via this form so it can be added to the Reactify blog.

It all starts with selecting a “topic” to write on.

For any technical article to be accepted as a valid contribution to Reactify, the following should be noted.

All articles to be contributed to the Reactify project must be standard and of top quality else, such will not be considered a successful/valid contribution.
All articles to be contributed must be project-based. It must have a project/code repository for learners to clone and make reference to whenever they need some help. Except if that topic does not have a project scope.

I’ve come to discover how helpful project-based technical tutorials (articles or videos) can be. You can simply run back to the code-base to refresh especially if you already cloned it into your PC. Hence, according to Reactify standards, every technical article to be contributed must be project-based and the project must be hosted on a GitHub repository whose link will be added to the README file of the related branch as part of the contributions.

All articles to be contributed must be articles that you have publishing rights over. If the article is you own, then go ahead and contribute without any hesitation. But if it’s not, permission must then be sought from the content owner, before contributing it to Reactify.

Reactify is a lifelong project that continues beyond Hacktoberfest 2022, but you want to do your best to finish up with making all 4 Hacktoberfest 2022 contributions (successful pull requests) before the deadline - (31st October 2022).

Afterward, you can then go ahead and continue making contributions at your own pace.

How to make your contribution to the Reactify project.

Step 1: Fork the Reactify repository to have your own copy of the repository on your github account – Remember to get all branches. Reactify is not a “main-branch only” project.
Step 2: Make your contribution to the relevant branch of the project.
Step 3: Review your contribution to ENSURE THERE ARE NO ERRORS.
Step 4: Create a pull request.

I promise to address every pull request as soon as I get them.

Maybe you wish to contribute to Reactify, but feel discouraged because you’re scared you won’t have enough time. Don’t worry – You would certainly find quality issues on the Reactify repository that you can handle within 1 hour if you get to understand the project very well. By committing only about 1hour within the next 4 days, you can be done with all four valid and accepted Hacktoberfest contributions, with about 5 days still in your hands to do more before the end of Hacktoberfest 2022.

Permit some hitches please.

I’ve been building and working on Reactify for a while now, But it’s been a project that I over-underrated. I must confess that setting up and maintaining an opensource project of this nature is huge work. Hence I plead with every contributor, to bear with any hitches that they might experience while trying to make their contributions.

Reactify is actually the first opensource project that I will be maintaining.

Contributor code of conduct.

Reactify is an opensource project that will be receiving contributions from various contributors who are of different backgrounds and different skill levels. Hence, it is important for everyone to collaborate peacefully and as a team. Reactify Code of conduct follows the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

By making a contribution to the project, every contributor agrees to abide by the dictates of the Contributor Covenant code of conduct, and agrees that their contributions are out of goodwill and not for any financial returns from Reactify.

The project maintainer(s) reserve the right to direct the project and make decisions as seen fit for the progress of the project. All relevant suggestions are very much welcomed – we’re one big team guys.

Maintainer contact.

While trying to make contributions to the project, if you encounter any challenges, I’ll be just a Twitter or a Linkedin DM away. You can also send me an email on: okpainmoandrew@gmail.com

How to contribute to Reactify as a maintainer.

If your wish to contribute to Reactify as a maintainer, Please contact me using any of the above contact details of mine – I’ll be sooo glad to have a helping hand 😫😫😫.

Don’t hesitate to raise issues and make suggestions.

As part of efforts to release it for public contributions, Some aspects of it might be seen as premature for release to the public. In the real sense, however, that’s one of the purposes behind getting all hands on deck by making it an opensource project – let’s build this guys.

Please do not hesitate to create issues on the repository.

Type of issues to create on the Reactify Github repository.

There are basically three types of issues to be created.

Topical issues: this will be technical article topic issues. These kind of issues are simply topics for technical articles contributors to write on and contribute to the different categories on the Reactify blog. After stating a topic, please comment on the issue with as much detail as possible.
Reactify blog/project core issues: These are issues that relate to code contributions to the “reactify-blog” branch – which is the branch to host the Reactify blog.
General issues: These are issues that pertain to other aspects of the project like contributing relevant documents and other features to the project repository.

Just do not hesitate to create an issue – especially ones you wish to handle.

After creating an issue by yourself, please wait for a maintainer to reply, approve and have the issue assigned to you before you proceed with handling it.

Issues with the “free-issue” label, are free to be taken. Issues with the "assigned" label are already taken, hence should be skipped.

Once you take up any issue, please ensure that the "assigned" label is added to it by the maintainer. So that no one else takes up that issue as well.

Conclusion

That's it folks, Reactify – a project that has got my hands tied for days. I hope all the labour pays off, and that it makes so much impact in the global ReactJs ecosystem.

Hacktoberfest is just about nine(9) days to go, so let’s hurry – let the contributions begin to roll in.

Cheers 🥰🥰🥰.

Finish Celebrating Hacktoberfest 2022 by contributing to Reactify.

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