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. 😄
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
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:
Forem 🌱
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 — 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!
Latest comments (41)
Can someone please tell the eligible repos this year. As i have made 15 prs but out which 9 prs have been declared as ineligible repo. So can anyone please help me with this?
I'm excited to participate in my first #hacktoberfest, as well as join the community here at DEV! I had been a free software user for a long time before I made my first code contribution, I know all the roadblocks that can get in the way of even trying ;)
For those new to it, I recommend looking at the issue boards on GitHub for tools you use already and might know something about. I'm an Emacs user, so many of my contributions revolve around that. Its easier when you have some context for the software you're using.
Look for places in the documentation that could be fixed, try to help someone in a chat or stack overflow and see if that leads to something you can fix in code. Ask questions, find a community willing to help you help :)
I plan to make some posts throughout the month talking about the process of identifying issues I can take on in the small amounts of time I have, and (hopefully) how to work through the issue and make a meaningful contribution. A little bit goes a long way in a public good like free software, so find the little bit you can do!
We have quite a bit of OSS opportunity at Exercism!
Want to help people learn programming languages?
Derk-Jan Karrenbeld ・ Sep 26 ・ 3 min read
Ah, my bad. Missed a zero there.
Nice to see Dev is going to be a part of it. This will be my 3rd Hacktober.
Looking forward to another t-shirt and those dev stickers 🤤
Hey help here. I opened a pr that has my commits and a fellow colleague commits then I saw the creating a pr from someone else's branch is disruptive. How can I remove this pr from my hacktoberfest account. Since am seeing it already being tracked on my profile. Thanks
It is a month-long event held in October, where you submit 5 pull requests (doesn't matter whether they get accepted or not) to either your own repos or someone else's, though, it's preferable to submit to someone else's repo.
As Ben said, the first 5000 people to complete this challenge will get some stickers, a limited edition T-shirt and other swag.
Ben had it at 50,000
More than a little surprised that the official rules require PRs to be on Github...a platform which isn't open source. Why aren't, for example, Gitlab PRs eligible? Is Github a sponser of the event? They aren't listed. Why was this decision made?
Separately, how do these rules apply to maintainers of open source projects? Do PRs count if they are made by a maintainer of a repo? The rules don't seem to indicate otherwise.
In the past the event has been clearly sponsored by Github. It is less clear if is is or not this year.
github.blog/2018-09-24-hacktoberfe...
Gotcha. I imagine they are involved in some official capacity this year as well then.
It is strange to see Github attempting to "own" open source in this way though. Very antagonistic to the spirit of open source. Many of the projects I use are not hosted on Github, so this is an unfortunate decision (Ruby, Wordpress, Chromium, Firefox, Drupal, etc). Though it makes sense when viewed as an ad campaign.
I guess what annoys me about this is the branding as an "open source" event. I don't see it as an open source event, I see it as a Github event which happens to help open source. The github equivalent of a retailer donating some-percent of a purchase to charity.
We're hosting some awesome communities in Milan to spend a full Saturday coding and learning open source.
If you happen to be in town on Saturday 5th, come join us!
meetup.com/it-IT/Open-Source-Satur...
Hi, I started to learn coding 14 months ago and have some basic understanding of CSS, JS and GIT. I would like to participate to gain experience. Does anyone have good recommendations for beginners?
I usually don't take too much of my time contributing to Open Source projects, but this month seems to be a great opportunity to start contributing!
Looking forward to see who I can help!
Understand this as "please, post some Contributors Wanted" articles guys 😁
I just signed up for it and wonder if it would count if I committed any pull requests before the 1st of october, as I've already got my profile and stuff set up?
Does it track every PR during my period logged in or just those that are happening exactly between October 1st an 31st?
I would really like to start of right now, but I'm afraid that my PR's were not going to be counted.
It's simple, only PRs opened between October 1st and October 31st will count. You can still start right now, work on something, but wait until October 1st to open the PR.
Can we participate online? Also are newbies allowed? Lol
Yes and yes!
It's all about open source contributing. Please find guides for newbies and then look for the issues. More guidance coming in the near future.
I am excited. I finally have a reason to step out of my comfort zone and beat the imposter syndrome. I believed that I have to be an expert to be able to contribute even slightly to other's code. I hope to find out that I too can help out.
Hacktoberfest sounds amazing! I hope I can make my first contribution to open source, for the first time in my life. Really excited about it.
Great article btw!
Just found out about this and wow, it sounds very cool! Hope to find some interesting Rust/Haskell projects.