Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is an annual initiative aimed at encouraging contributions to open source projects. The initiative is supported by DigitalOcean.com, dev.to and GitHub.com. First 50,000 contributors that open 4 pull requests to open source projects on GitHub and have those approved during October are eligible to receiving t-shirts and stickers. Some Open Source projects also offer some perks to contributors.

Contributing to Open Source is easy and there are lots of opportunities for beginners.

Why participating?

1. You can make Open Source projects better by contributing to code and documentation
2. Earn cool stuff (a t-shirt and stickers) from organizers
3. Highlight your contribution in your CV as a competitive advantage when seeking a job

Any meetups?

Check Hacktoberfest official site.

Kottans may also announce related events. Join Kottans public chat and Kottans Radio channel on Telegram and look for announcements during September and early October.

Participants are required to follow Hacktoberfest Events Code of Conduct

What happens on Kottans Hacktoberfest event?

The aim of the event is to make participants comfortable with contributing to Open Source projects. Typical agenda is:

• Registration and Intro
• Contribution flow for beginners
• How to find any opportunities to contribute
• Contributing
• Wrap up

How to find any opportunities to contribute?

Check the following:

• Hacktoberfest official site suggestions of issues collections
• Kottans Hacktoberfest and beginners friendly issues
• GitHub: Open issues by labels
• CodeTriage offers a filter per programming language
• Awesome First PR Opportunities with projects grouped per programming language
• Great for new contributors

How to contribute?

Make sure you're registered at Hacktoberfest.

To become eligible for Hacktoberfest Complete the following several times during October

1. Find an issue you believe you can resolve
2. Make yourself familiar with contribution guidelines (look for CONTRIBUTING.md in the project you're gonna contribute to)
3. Apply for assignment
4. Get assignment (See this issue as an example of how contribution assignment is communicated and handled)
5. Fork a repo
6. Add changes (refer to the issue in a commit message)
7. Push changes
8. Open a PR
9. Implement changes if requested
10. Get the PR approved and changes merged into master

You're done! Congratulations!

Need more technical details?

Check the following resources for more details:

• How to Contribute to Open Source
• Contributing with Git and Git workflow and GitHub modules from Kottans git course
• Contributing to a 3rd party repo for beginners and contribution flow visualized
• How to Contribute to an Open Source Project