Do you know about Hacktoberfest? If you are a developer and have no idea about Hacktoberfest, then you are seriously missing out on some action.
Hacktoberfest takes place in October each year and is an online competition where developers from all around the world participate in open-source projects to contribute. This is open for all events in which the more you contribute the more recognition you get, and the more connections you make with developers from around the world.
Anyone with a Github/BitBucket account can participate by signing up o the official Hacktoberfest website and start contributing straight away.
The Process of Hacktoberfest
To participate in Hacktoberfest, the process is pretty simple, here it is broken down into steps.
- Sign Up to Hacktoberfest official site with a GitHub/BitBucket account.
- Scroll through projects that are available for contribution and choose a relevant one.
- Try to start off with some contribution, something simple like toggles or search filters.
- Write quality code with reasonable comments, you are contributing to opensource projects after all.
- When done make the Pull request and hope it gets approved.
The key here is to have as many relevant PR’s as possible. The PR’s that you make have to be again relevant, functional, and testable. Once the owner of the project/repository views your code, they will test it in terms of both functional behavior and clean verifiable code.
The Rewards of Hacktoberfest
Following things are rewarded for your contributions to the community.
- Cool T-shirt, or swag as the hacktoberfest’ team calls it.
- A tree planted in your name, hence contributing to the society and the earth.
- Exposure and connections with the wittiest minds out there.
- Growth in your public profile, open source contributions directly reflects it.
Again, people contribute to open-source projects, not for monetary gains, rather give back to the community and make some new connections along the way!
The Outcome and Conclusion
Hacktoberfest is of its kind an open-source contribution platform that single-handedly raises the total number of worldwide contributions on open-source projects within a month. It is a great initiative by the digital ocean and more companies should organize such events so that like-minded programmers can meet up and share some whole code, and some wholesome swag.
If this concept of contributing to opensource excites you and you are not a developer. Then maybe you should look more into web development or online coding bootcamps / tutorials. Who knows maybe next year you will be participating.