What is hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest 2021 is the 8th edition of Hacktoberfest hosted by DigitalOcean. It is a month long festival of open source software and helping people worldwide to enthusiastically participate and contribute to open source projects hosted across GitHub and GitLab. It happens every year during the month of October and is the easiest way to get into open source!
The last Hacktoberfest recorded 169,886 participants and 116,361 participating repositories, representing 135 countries.
What can we get out of this?
Hacktoberfest comes with a lot of rewards for contributing to the Open Source community!
Participants who successfully reach the target of 4+ eligible Pull Requests are rewarded with the hacktoberfest swag combo which contains a hacktoberfest branded T-Shirt and stickers. This year the organisers of the fest- Digital Ocean have also provided a choice to all qualified participants to get a tree planted instead of receiving the usual swags.
There are also numerous tech companies that partake in Hacktoberfest and give away swags of their own- usually on the criteria that you contribute to their projects.
But more than the T-Shirts or the stickers, is the knowledge and the experience you get out of this fest. Repositories all around the world mark themselves by participating and open easier issues to help beginners ease into open-source contribution. Owners, maintainers, mentors, event-organisers, and other more experienced contributors- all are eager and equipped to help every participant regardless of background.
How do I participate?
The first thing you should is head right over to hacktoberfest registration page. Next just start contributing to any participating open source project from Oct 01 — Oct 31.
And if you meet the contribution criteria set by Digital Ocean, you’ll receive the Hacktoberfest swags from Digital Ocean!
You just need some basic knowledge of how GitHub works paired with some idea of the technological stack you prepare to contribute to. To get a better idea of all these concepts and more resources, there is no better source than hacktoberfest’ s own beginner guide.
