Hacktoberfest and How to contribute as a beginner?
What is Hacktoberfest 2020?
Hacktoberfest is a month-long global celebration for open-source contributions presented by DigitalOcean, Intel and DEV. It is celebrated in the month of October and everyone in the global community can participate. Whether you’re a developer, student learning to code, event host, or the company of any size, you can help drive the growth of open source and make positive contributions to an ever-growing community. All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to complete the challenge.
Rules to participate
To participate and for successful completion of Hacktoberfest 2020 challenge, one must abide by the following rules to earn the limited edition Hacktoberfest tee or tree reward.
- You must register and make four valid pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31.
- PRs can be made to participating public repos on GitHub, those that have the Hacktoberfest topic.
- If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam or behaviour not in line with the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate.
- This year, the first 70,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge will be eligible to receive a prize.
Why do you think there is a need to celebrate Hacktoberfest?
Being an Open Source enthusiast, I see Hacktoberfest as bringing together two values, ‘Appreciation’ and ‘Inauguration’. Appreciation to the work of millions of open-source contributors and project maintainers who help in the constant improvement of free Open-Source Softwares (OSS). And, Inauguration to the Open-Source journeys of all new contributors who happened to submit their first pull request during Hacktoberfest events. DigitalOcean and its partners award these contributions by sending a token of appreciation i.e. your Hacktoberfest Tee with some awesome stickers.
What’s new this year?
This year, DigitalOcean is helping the environment by giving us the option to plant a tree rather than receive a shirt. Also, to limit the carbon impact, they are paying for carbon offsets.
Fun fact: Hacktoberfest shirts flew 336 million miles internationally last year. In total, it adds up to a fully loaded 747 flying 676 miles.
What can you contribute?
To get started with Open-Source you need not be a coder. You can even contribute to the documentation, spelling fixing, opening an issue etc. Though a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub is required to make contributions. You can get yourself familiar with Git commands by this cheatsheet by GitHub Education.
How to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge?
To complete the Hacktoberfest Challenge, you first need to have a GitHub account. Sign up to GitHub here: https://github.com/
Now, register at the official website of Hacktoberfest 2020 to make your pull requests count.
Now, search for a project on GitHub which has a ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to it by either typing ‘topic:hacktoberfest’ on GitHub search or just directly click here. You can filter repositories/projects by languages or sort them as required.
For the purpose of this blog, we’ll use the below repository:
The first thing that is to be done while contributing to any project is to go through the README and CONTRIBUTING file. After reading through them, you will get to know what is to be done. For this repository, you need to add a markdown file inside the ‘participants’ folder with some of your basic details. You can complete this task by simply following the steps given in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
To know more about the used commands, you can read this blog.
After you have completed the above steps, creating a pull request is pretty simple. Go to the repository on your profile and then click the “Compare & pull request” option.
It will direct you to the original repository. Update the topic of the pull request and add adescription. Then click on “Create pull request”
Voila!! You made a pull request. To complete the challenge you need to make at least 4 such pull requests.
Check your progress
To check if you have made at least 4 pull requests, eligibility for your contributions, you can check your status on the Hacktoberfest website.
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
Just click on the Profile button on the top menu, and this will show you your pull requests and how many you have made so far.
There is a maturing period of 14 days. It means that your PR’s will be reviewed and if passed they’ll become valid — which means you’ll have successfully completed this year’s challenge.
Beyond Hacktoberfest!
Once you complete the challenge don’t stop contributing. Look for some ‘good first issues’ in Open Source projects that are used by millions of users. The pleasure of getting the PR merged in production into such organizations is incomparable.
Keep learning & Keep Contributing!
