Happy Hacktoberfest, everybody!
Hacktoberfest? Haven't heard of it? No worries. Well, honestly speaking I also got to know about it very recently. As they say, 'It's better late than never'.
The month of October is nearing and so is the best time to get into open source and win amazing rewards.

Hacktoberfest is an open-source festival where developers from all over the world contribute to open-source projects.
Let’s first start by understanding about open-source projects. First of all what is open-source? Open-source is a software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Nowadays many companies around the globe make their code base open source i.e., people can propose changes in the code, fix bugs, etc. in order to bring about a better version of the program. Some famous names which have their code base open source are Android, VLC Media Player, Mozilla Firefox and many more. Not just companies but many developers also collaborate on developing open source softwares, so that others can also contribute to it.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event which is conducted annually in October and is powered by Digital Ocean, a popular American Cloud Computing company.

You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31. So, its October, you have signed up for Hacktoberfest, but what do you actually have to do??
Basically, once you’ve signed up for the fest you need to go on GitHub and contribute to open-source projects on the platform. You don’t need to be a coding expert, the pull request can even be a bug fix, an improvement in the code or even a documentation change.But, what's a pull request? A pull request is an event in Git where a contributor asks a maintainer of a Git repository to review code they want to merge into a project.

There are many repositories on GitHub. But, only those tagged with Hactoberfest can reward you points or are valid for Hacktoberfest. A repository/project is considered to be participating in Hacktoberfest if the 'Hacktoberfest' topic is present and is accepting public contributions via pull requests. An individual pull request can also be opted-in directly by adding the 'Hacktoberfest-accepted' label. A pull request is considered approved once it has an overall approving review from maintainers, or has been merged by maintainers, or has been given the 'Hacktoberfest-accepted' label. Once four of your pull requests gets merged into the code base i.e., four of your change proposals get accepted you become eligible to win the limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt, stickers and Digital Ocean rewards. This year, the first 50,000 participants can earn a T-shirt. Another initiative by Hacktoberfest is 'TREES NOT TEES'. Rather than receive t-shirts as swag, you can choose to have a tree planted in your name and help make Hacktoberfest 2021 more carbon neutral. The recognition and exposure you get by participating in such fests and contributing to open-source projects is like another feather in your cap.

So what are you waiting for? Get on your toes and let's contribute to the open-source community!
Happy Hacking!