killersheep.nvim VS vscode-pets

There is this plugin that lets you take care of a herd of sheep: https://github.com/seandewar/killersheep.nvim

For those who don’t know, Marc is responsible for many of the cute critters in the incomparable vscode-pets extension. This extension brings our DevRel team at SeMI tiny morsels of joy and respite on a regular basis, and I couldn’t have been more excited to find out one of the wizards behind the curtain. In his talk, Marc shared his own experiences of how he turned his interests and skill sets to create fun, meaningful connections with his tech communities. For example, he built a game, and created 8-bit art and avatars for himself, others, and his clients. He also shared examples of how others combine their own unique hobbies and skills like music, comedy, art, cross-stitching, and sewing to do the same.

Today, I wanted to share what I have learned working on the issue of creating a new pet animations for the VSCode extension VS Code Pets.

During hacktoberfest month, I contributed to the vscode-pets which was a VSCode extension with cute pets to play with while coding. I really liked the general idea, plus, the founder and maintainer of the project was always helpful and quick to respond. It was such a nice contributing experience that I continued making contributions even after the fest was done.

not laser cat, but maybe you can hack this one to add your own

One my Hacktoberfest contributions was made to the cool VSCode extension project called VS Code Pets. It allows you to add and play with different cute pets in your VS Code window to boost productivity and help you stay focused.

My first 2 PRs(1st & 2nd) were likely newbie level and I wanted to contribute to something more meaningful, something that would challenge me intellectually. I spent a good week or so stressing over what to contribute to next on the issues page, only to stress even more. What became clear to me was that if you are scrolling and scrolling through the issues page just to find the perfect issue for your use case, you're doomed... there are another 20K people doing the same just to get swags. That way, you are probably spending more energy searching than you would have spent on writing a new feature from scratch or a tough bug fix.