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Ben Halpern for The DEV Team

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Hacktoberfest Starts in Six Days πŸŽƒπŸŽ‰

For six years and counting, DigitalOcean has run a campaign throughout October to celebrate Open Source. To participate, you need to make at least four legit pull requests to open source projects. As a reward, the first 50,000 people to complete the challenge will receive a bunch of free SWAG, including a limited edition t-shirt for that year's celebration. It's called Hacktoberfest.

This year, DEV is proud to be a co-presenter of the month-long event. That means when you get your prize, it will include DEV goodies like stickers. You will also get a unique Hacktoberfest badge for your DEV profile when you complete the challenge. πŸ˜„

As a co-host, we will be extra committed to boosting the event on DEV! So for the month of Hacktoberfest, we will be encouraging plenty of use of the on-site tag, and encouraging everyone to show off their projects, their contributions, and to see what types of contributions others are making. We’re really excited to see the DEV Community participating in this global celebration of open-source.

#hacktoberfest

Happy hacking! πŸŽƒ

What kind of content makes for a good Hacktoberfest post on DEV? Here are five ideas

1. Make a "Contributors Wanted" post if you maintain a repo

Tag your post #hacktoberfest and #contributorswanted and link to the repo with some encouraging guidance on where to get started.

Perhaps embed your repo in for extra clarity, like so:

GitHub logo forem / forem

For empowering community 🌱


Forem 🌱

For Empowering Community

Build Status Build Status GitHub commit activity GitHub issues ready for dev GitPod badge

Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our communities.

What is Forem?

Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective See our announcement post for a high-level overview of what Forem is.

dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles. We value supportive and constructive dialogue in the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place…

For stickiness, you may also want to create a listing

2. Start a general discussion, or request for ideas

Ask the community on an ongoing basis which repos might be looking for contributors.

3. Write a post detailing each of your pull requests

Embed the pull request and tell a story of your process for discovering the right issue that needed to be tackled and how you went about doing it.

Fix tags format in Article create API #4075

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

  • [ ] Refactor
  • [ ] Feature
  • [ ] Bug Fix
  • [x] Documentation Update

Description

Fixes tags format in the API docs

Related Tickets & Documents

Closes #4073

Added to documentation?

  • [x] docs.dev.to
  • [ ] readme
  • [ ] no documentation needed

Click the ? in the DEV editor for guidance on how to embed different types of content.

4. Post about any Hacktoberfest meetups

It looks like that's already begun happening on DEV...

5. Just have fun with it

Not every post requires a specific outcome, let's just make sure that this is an especially inclusive and wonderful month for the broader open source community...

Going forward

  • Come back to DEV every day during October for discussion and discovery. The community will be here to help.
  • Look for chances to contribute to DEV itself β€” we will be putting in work this week to make sure the repo is extra ready come October.
  • Add your DEV icon to your personal site alongside your other social links, so that anybody who stumbles across your website knows where to find your Hacktoberfest content.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Happy coding!

Top comments (45)

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peter profile image
Peter Kim Frank

We are so excited be partners on this year's celebration alongside our friends at DigitalOcean! It's very cool to be part of something that helps get more people involved with open-source.

Looking forward to many interesting articles and discussions over in the #hacktoberfest tag!

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jackharner profile image
Jack Harner πŸš€

Did my first Hacktoberfest last year with a PR to DEV! Really excited again for this year and it's so cool y'all can be a bigger part of it.

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pbouillon profile image
Pierre Bouillon

YEAH !

I'm really keen to dive into this event once again ! It's one of the things that drove me to contribute to open-source and discover some things about it. It's awesome to see that my favorite community is also part of it ! πŸ˜„

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igorperikov profile image
Igor Perikov

A nice time of the year, indeed ❀️I have created a program, which looks for beginner issues, so you might want to try it out - github.com/igorperikov/mighty-watcher. Repository itself is hacktoberfest-native, so you can contribute to it as well!

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drbragg profile image
Drew Bragg

So excited for this!

The past 2 years I haven't felt like I could make meaningful contributions (or at least couldn't find anything within my wheel house) but this year I actually feel confident that I could find and fix real issues!

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kristenkinnearohlmann profile image
Kristen Kinnear-Ohlmann

I believe this is my 3rd year participating in Hacktoberfest. I hope to move beyond contributing revisions to freeCodeCamp knowledgebase articles and write some actual code!

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bbarbour profile image
Brian Barbour

I've been super nervous to jump into open source, but this may be my chance.

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johanneslichtenberger profile image
Johannes Lichtenberger

Every kind of contribution is special. For instance if you get your first typo fixes :-)

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

Excited to participate for the first time this year πŸ˜ƒ

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johanneslichtenberger profile image
Johannes Lichtenberger • Edited

That's so awesome. I just made a post about a Vue.js front-end I want to build and looking for help as I'm super new to the front-end stuff :-)

dev.to/johanneslichtenberger/searc...

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt β˜•

Ooooh i'm so excited ! Hacktoberfest w/ dev.to ❀

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keziahmoselle profile image
Keziah

This is awesome !
I hope I will have the time to contribute to some great projects :D

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dzhavat profile image
Dzhavat Ushev

Exciting! I participated last year and am sooo much looking forward to this year.

As far as I can remember, last year everyone who made four PRs got a t-shirt, not only the first 50,000. They've changed it a bit for this year. But regardless, it's a great opportunity to get involved with open source. :)

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takakd profile image
Takahiro Kudo

I'll participate for the first time! ☺️

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nicolepdotme profile image
Nicole Peery 🌡

Hacktoberfest was a great confidence builder for me last year. Excited to participate again. 😁

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jordonr profile image
Jordon Replogle

My first time was last year, and I would really encourage anyone to join and participate.