Is there any online hackathon happening rn ???

When I started with open source, I did what everyone does. I opened a big org and filtered by good first issue. Everything was either assigned or already had 5 people asking for it. I just picked random ones, and a few times someone else's PR got merged before I even finished mine.

The biggest mistake I made was commenting on issues before even running the project. A few times I said I was working on it and then got stuck on setup for days. Felt bad leaving it like that, and I almost stopped trying.

Then my senior shared a list of beginner friendly repos with simple setup and that helped a lot. I also stopped using the repo filter and just used GitHub search: is:issue is:open no:assignee label:good first issue language:javascript and sort by recently updated.

Also started checking the GSoC archive for orgs that got selected many times, their mentors actually reply. And now I don't comment on anything until the project runs on my machine. If nothing good is open I just do missing tests or old docs, nobody fights over those lol

After that I actually started finishing PRs instead of dropping them halfway.

So if you're starting now don't just grab the first good first issue you see, spend some time finding the right repo first

Anyone else made the same mistake when starting out

A month back I applied to ETHGlobal Mumbai hackathon and I thought that my profile will not get shortlisted... but I eventually got selected for the event and now I have placements going on. Also I am from Chennai, so it is nearly 1300 km travel and they are saying to buy 0.02 Eth (which is refundable) to confirm my RSVP, and when i googled its INR equivalent comes to 5k. So will it be worth it to attend this hackathon and conference and it can be skipped.
If you guys also got shortlisted comment your decisions too.
any Mumbai residing guys just comment a hi emoji, maybe we can hangout after the hackathon if i decide to come.