Hactoberfest time!

[cesine]

Hi everybody!

This october, if you have time, you can participate in Hactoberfest and try to make pull requests for projects you want to help
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com

Take a look for projects who have easy pull requests that they need http://yourfirstpr.github.io/

A blog about someones first pull request:
http://dev-human.com/entries/2015/09/25/my-first-pull-request/

There's always a first time: the story of my first Pull Request
Erika Heidi Life and Code Sep 25, 2015
It was just another day at the office: got my coffee, opened my PHP IDE, joined some IRC channels in case I needed help with something code-related. It was my first year in Amsterdam, my first year getting involved with the PHP community. By that time, I never had been in a PHP conference before, and the only "PHPeople" I knew in real life were from the AmsterdamPHP meetup group.

I was working with Silex, a microframework based on Symfony. It's simple, small, you add the components as you need them. Gives you a great foundation, with absolute freedom - something that I much appreciate in my projects.

Everything was working great in my Silex project, until that morning. I got stuck with an upload problem (who never?), and the error message was anything but informative: "The file 'myimage.jpg' is not valid".

OK, so my image is invalid. In my conception, this means that there's something wrong with the image file, or maybe the framework is not accepting that mimetype for uploads - is there any configuration file where I had to enable it? Tried another JPG, same error. Tried a PNG, same error. Naturally, from the error message, I assumed it was not environment-related. If that was the case, the message should be clear, like "hey, you have a permission problem in your upload folder", or something.

After making tests with other images, it became obvious that the problem was, indeed, environment related: small images would work just fine. Then I checked my php.ini and fixed the problem by increasing the upload size limit.

It didn't took me so long to find out the problem and fix it, but only because I was experienced enough with file uploads to believe in my instincts and check the environment. The error message was confusing. It would be tough for an inexperienced programmer to discover the problem.

Taking Responsibility
Considering all this, I went to the #silex-php channel on IRC to report the situation - although this wasn't a critical problem, I still felt like it was my duty. It was one of the first times that I talked into the open channel. I re-wrote the sentence at least 5 times before hitting enter, because, you know: I didn't want it to sound like a complain, I just wanted to give a friendly "heads up" to help making Silex better.

After an endless moment of suspense, Igor Wiedler - one of the major Silex contributors - answered me in the channel, and his answer totally caught me by surprise: "Can you make a PR? That would be great".

Took me some seconds to realize that, by PR, he meant a Pull Request. Because, by that time, I'd never made a Pull Request in my life; I've only heard about it. And yes, I shared code before, I had at least one open source repository on GitHub with some sort of library I wrote, but I never had contributed to someone else's open source project.
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