In the begining, I didn't know where to look or what kind of project I wanted to contribute, I just knew I wanted to use tecnologies I had already some experience with for the project. I started by talking with a friend of mine that already had experience contributing to open source software. After talking with her, I had a good insight on where to start looking and what to expect when contributing to a project.
Some of the tips she gave me included: the hacktoberfest, an annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source during October and has many diferent types of projects and ideas to contribute to, the "Serenata de amor", a colaborative project from Open Knowledge Brasil (OKBR) that uses data science to inspect public expenses and make this kind of information more acessible, and "Up for Grabs", a website with a list of many different possible projects to contribute to, most of them begginer friendly for a first contribution.
At first, I was specially interested in the Serenata de Amor because of it's social importance and scale of the project, however, I soon realized it was bigger than I anticipated, with tecnologies I wasn't familiar with, so I ended up looking for a simpler project to contribute, with more room to freely decide what to do and how, and I found the 100LinesOfCode repository. It is basicaly a compilation of many small projects that range from usefull extensions and small applications to simple games, the only restrictions is the code can't be more than 100 lines long.
## My contribution
With the freedom to chose anything to code, I saw an opportunity to improve my skills of web development, something I recently started to learn, and I mixed it with my love for games to create a simple browser game. It's a game to test the reaction time of the player, where images of animals periodically appear on the screen at random positions and the player has to click them as fast as he can, after which the time he took to click is registered and displayed for the player. The choice to use animal pictures was to bring a more comic effect on the idea that you are trying to pet the animals, as it's more of a little entertainment to pass the time then a serios reaction time test.
## Conclusion
With the amount of freedom this project gives the student, I thought it was a really enjoyable project to do, with very different challenges compared to other academic projects. This project helped me better understand github as a whole and get the experience of contributing to an open source project, which I will probably want to do more in the future. It also helped me finaly develop more of my web development skills, something I was having trouble finding the time to do.
I really hope and look foward to do more meaningfull contributions in bigger open source projects in the future, like the one my friend did with the OKBR.
