Do your Best at the Hacktoberfest!
-Vasundhara Polya & Saipriya Rajagopal
What does October remind you of? Most of you would probably say Halloween, but within the techie community, there’s a much bigger celebration going on called the Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a party for the open-source world, and just how Halloween isn’t really a spooky holiday and it’s more about the fun, participating in Hacktoberfest and contributing to open-source aren’t intimidating, it’s actually a carnival for coders!
So what exactly is Hacktoberfest? Well, it’s really just a month dedicated to contributing to open-source projects that are participating in this festival. People and communities put up projects registered under Hacktoberfest on GitHub and GitLab, and participants can explore them and provide their own additions. Apart from this, plenty of events are hosted, and donations are made towards open source projects to encourage them to develop further.
Why take part in Hacktoberfest, you might ask. There are many reasons why Hacktoberfest is something you shouldn’t miss.
- For starters, it’s a great place to familiarize yourself with open-source contributions.
- It gives you a lot of exposure to different projects and ideas and expands your understanding of different coding styles.
- You can develop your professional network and collaborate with like-minded developers
- And last but not the least, there is an amazing array of goodies and swag to be won, when you make four successful pull requests!
If you’re looking to take part in Hacktoberfest, just follow these simple steps and get started on your open-source adventure!
- If you don’t have one already, make a GitHub account as it is the main essential to be able to participate.
- Register for Hacktoberfest at their official website:
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
using your GitHub account. - Now it’s time for you to explore the uncharted territory of repositories in GitHub that are accepting contributions as part of Hacktoberfest.
- Once you find a repository with projects that you’d like to contribute to, explore it a bit to see if you can improve it in any way or check the issues raised previously to see if you can resolve any of them.
- While you formulate your contribution, keep in mind that it should be substantial in content and should be well thought out, for it to be accepted by the owners of the repository. Go through the README file of the repository to understand what its maintainers are looking for in a contribution.
- When you finalize what you’d like to add to or change in that repository, make a pull request to its owners with your contribution, and voila! You’ve taken your first step into this bustling world of open-source!
So you might be wondering what open-source is, and at first glance, it might seem like an advanced technical sphere, much beyond the scope of a beginner. However, it’s really just code put out by a developer or a group of developers, for anyone in the technical community to contribute to, modify or redistribute it. There are numerous platforms on which you can practice open-source contributions, but the most popular one is GitHub, and it’s also the prime place of activity for Hacktoberfest. Although there are a lot of things you can accomplish with Github, the only thing you really need to know to participate in Hacktoberfest is how to make a pull request.
Let’s learn how to make a pull request.
- First fork the repository that you are targeting your changes towards.
- Make a local clone of the forked repository to your system.
- Create a new branch within this repository and add your changes to it.
- Push these additions or modifications back to the remote repository.
- To start creating the pull request, click on the ‘Compare & pull request” button.
- Open the pull request by clicking on the ‘Create pull request’ button and you’re done!
If you want to dive deeper into the incredible world of GitHub you can check out their official website here for more tricks and twists:
With this, you’re all equipped to set out on your Hacktoberfest journey in the open-source universe. If you’re lost and stuck on how to get started, worry not, because IEEE-WIE VIT has got you covered with their beginner-friendly repository! It’s the perfect place to get started for newbies participating in Hacktoberfest as it’s been curated to match the frequency of those who recently stepped into the open-source universe. Learn all about their repository over here:
https://github.com/IEEE-WIE-VIT/Everything-CPP
So what are you waiting for? Register for Hacktoberfest, make your first pull request, and enter the powerful realm of open-source!
