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Govind S Nair
Govind S Nair

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My First Hacktoberfest: Contributing to Open Source!

This is a submission for the 2024 Hacktoberfest Writing challenge: Contributor Experience

I've been wanting to get into open source for a while, and Hacktoberfest finally motivated me to take the plunge this year. I'm excited to share that I've completed four PRs (with more on the way!), and it feels great to be part of something bigger!

I primarily worked on a project called PyDeepFlow, a beginner-friendly Python library for deep learning. As a data science student, I’ve always been curious about what happens behind the scenes of the machine learning models we use, and this project provided the perfect opportunity to explore that.

Contributing to PyDeepFlow was challenging—not just because it was my first open-source contribution, but also because it was my first time working on a project of this nature. Thankfully, Ravin, the repository owner, was incredibly supportive and guided me through the process. I learned a lot about neural networks and their architectures, explored data pre-processing, augmentation techniques, and regularization methods, and got more comfortable with other Python libraries commonly used in machine learning.

In addition to PyDeepFlow, I also made non-code contributions by improving documentation and handling translations for several other projects.

Hacktoberfest has been an amazing gateway into the open-source community. It has allowed me to connect with talented developers from around the world, and I’ve gained so much from the collaboration and support. Looking forward to continuing my contributions and learning more as I go!

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