Hacktoberfest - Open Source and Lots More

I love Hacktoberfest. The very idea of it is to promote folks discovering the process of open-source contributions.

My team at Vonage sponsored this year. If you've been on the Hacktoberfest Discord, you'll see us (and most definitely me) helping folks with general questions, and with how to get some free Vonage socks.

All my Vonage repositories are projects which won't go live for a while. So, I wanted to create a project for Hacktoberfest, that helped folks with Hacktoberfest, whilst providing easy issues for first timers to get involved with.

Enter, the Hacktoberfest repository checker.

Hacktoberfest Checker Overview

The checker is a decoupled Nuxt application, which deploys to Netlify along with a Netlify Function. That means that whilst being a static site, it has its own serverless backend to make requests to.

Users can enter a GitHub repository URL, or a username/repo-name, to check whether a repository is eligible for Hacktoberfest.

It works by requesting some information from GitHub in line with the 2020 rule changes.

• does the repository have the hacktoberfest topic?
• does the repository have any merged PRs with the hacktoberfest-accepted label?
• has the hacktoberfest-team raised an issue on the repository excluding it from taking part?

The project uses Nuxt.js (So... Vue.js components), TailwindCSS, Netlify Functions. It's a great template for a decoupled Jamstack Netlify hosted application with backend functionality.

Help is required with issues all the time, as we find ways to improve the site to support the Hacktoberfest event better

My Hacktoberfest Experience

As both sponsor, maintainer, and avid supporter of Hacktoberfest, I feel conflicted by what I've seen this year. Out of the tens of thousands of young folks first hearing of it, a large number seem more focused on the swag rather than the importance of open source.