Hacktoberfest

2-minute read
development

Hacktoberfest

October is here and, besides Halloween, for me that means Hacktoberfest! But what is Hacktoberfest? This post is here to tell you all that, and hopefully inspire you to participate!

Open source is a kind of license that allows the software to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. That is specially great for developers because we don’t need to write or buy all the things we need to use, and also we can read and understand how it all was written.

I dare to say, even if they don’t know it, almost every developer uses open source software. But how do we repay such good thing? We contribute! Writing our own open source software (I have some on my github check it out), fixing bugs or adding new features to existing open source software or donating money to them.

Every year, on October, Digital Ocean promotes an event to celebrate open source and help people give back to the community. This year (2022) is the 9th edition and, more and more, other companies are taking part and celebrating Hacktoberfest their own way. The event has grown so much, it’s now presented by Docker and Appwrite, besides Digital Ocean.

How it works

To participate, you need to:

  1. register on the website (here)
  2. look for participating projects by searching Github or Gitlab for “hacktoberfest”
  3. make 4 contributions and have your pull requests / merge requests accepted before October 31

That’s it! If you complete that you can choose one of two prizes: a tree planted in your name, or the Hacktoberfest t-shirt and some cool stickers.

Tips

Here are some of the things I’ve learned after participating in some Hacktoberfests:

  • Always be polite and kind: the event is supposed to bring the community together!
  • Quality is better than quantity: try to make some meaningful contributions!
  • Always follow the contribution guidelines, as well as the patterns already being used on the project.
  • If some reviewer asks you to make changes to your code, don’t take it personally, it probably is a great learning opportunity or a great way to discuss some new approaches.
  • Have fun!

Also, there are lots of other events happening during this period, it’s a great opportunity to go to your first tech event and meet some cool people!

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