Hacktoberfest 2020: Let’s Get Hacking

It's October and we're calling all programmers, designers, content writers and open-source contributors to join Hacktoberfest 2020. This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to open-source or try your hand at something new.

For those who are new to programming or open-source, you may be wondering what is open-source or Hacktoberfest.

Open source

Hacktoberfest

Seven years ago, Hacktoberfest kick-started the celebration along with 676 excited participants contributing to open source projects and earning a limited-edition T-shirt. Now, hundreds of thousands of developers participate in Hacktoberfest from 150 countries.

If you want to contribute to open-source projects, but don’t know where to start, then Hacktoberfest is the perfect opportunity for you.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software sponsored by Digital Ocean, Intel, and DEV.

The goal of the event is to encourage participation in the open-source community all across the globe. The challenge is quite simple: open four high-quality pull requests in October on any open source project to get some swag.

Swag you say?

If you complete valid 4prs, you stand to get a T-shirt, some stickers and a cup coaster (I got one last year, I'm not sure if they’ll be doing it this year also).

They also introduced the option to plant a tree instead of receiving a T-shirt as a reward to reduce the environmental impact.

So when completing four pull requests, you will have the choice between 2 options:

1. Choose a Hacktoberfest shirt

OR

2. Choose to donate a tree

(You can't choose both swag options)

If you want to plant a tree on your own, you can do so by going here: https://tree-nation.com/profile/digitalocean

Hacktoberfest can be intimidating as there’s a lot to study, read, and learn. So to give the community more time to get ready for Hacktoberfest, Digital Ocean deemed September as #Preptember, announcing the month as preparation. It has been a month full of learning, dedicated to preparing for Hacktoberfest, how to make quality pull requests, and giving maintainers more time to groom their repositories.

Before Joining Hacktoberfest

Here are some key terms that you'll need to know before you get started:

Version Control When developers work on a project together, oftentimes they’ll need to work on the same code base. While they’re working, each developer needs to know about what changes the other developer has made, so they do not duplicate the work or write code over what has been done. 

A version control system serves as a saving program for code, where it assigns a version to a project and tracks changes made over time to each file in the project. In this way, developers can work together on a project by checking the latest version to check the changes made before working on their portion of the project.

Git and GitHub Git, a version control system used to manage a developer’s projects of all sizes, was created to help developers contribute code and share code revisions in a way that was fast, efficient, and inexpensive. Git enables developers to edit, share, and publish code, facilitating collaboration and teamwork.

GitHub is a cloud-based git repository hosting service that allows developers to take code that they’ve written on their local machines and share it with the world. It provides a way to share the version-tracked projects on the local computer publicly through repositories or, central file storage locations. Depending on the project’s availability (it can be either a public or private repository), other developers can download the project to edit the code, provide insight, and more.

Also, before you start contributing you should have some basic knowledge of working on GitHub and most importantly that what is forking a project, cloning a project and making a pull request.

How to Get Started with Your Hacktober Journey?

Step 1: Sign Up

First, register at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

If you don’t, DigitalOcean and GitHub won’t know about you when they check for Pr’s. So before start contributing, remember to register yourself.

You can sign up anytime between 

October 1

and 

October 31

.

Step 2: Find a project that interests you and jump in!

Search the Hacktoberfest label on GitHub: there are thousands of issues to choose from.

If this is your first time then you may want to either pick a language you are comfortable with (so you’re not learning a new language and figuring out what help is needed) or pick some documentation.

Check for labels like beginners only, first-timers-only, beginners-friendly, good first-time issue, Great for new contributors, Good First Issues etc. as these are for beginners or for those contributing in open source for the first time.

Remember quality contributions are encouraged.

If you are maintaining a repo then: Create issues or label existing ones with Hacktoberfest on your GitHub projects to help new contributors know what to work on.

Step 3: Make your first PR

Then, submit at least four pull requests to any public GitHub repository and wait for it to be verified.

Note- It may take about 14 days to be verified. Earlier it used to be 7 days but recently, they increased the numbers of days to 14 maybe so that the owner of the repo would have more time to verify the pull request, and there would be fewer spams.

Step 4: Celebrate!!!🥳🥳🥳

Congrats for completing your first Hacktoberfest!!! Depending on what option you chose and where you live, you’ll receive your swag in a month or two.

If you’ve… 

• never contributed to open-source software on GitHub
• been excited to learn and play with a new programming language 
• been too overwhelmed to attend a developer hack night,                             
• waited all year long to celebrate open-source software and earn a limited edition T-shirt  

Then Hacktoberfest is here to encourage you to get hacking!

For more details, see the:

• Official site
• FAQs
• List of communities and their swag list