Have you ever heard of Hacktoberfest? Yes, you read me correctly, I did not write Oktoberfest, the annual beer festival that happens in October. 🍻
Hacktoberfest is a month long virtual event to celebrate open source contributions on GitHub and it is presented by DigitalOcean, DEV and Intel. It is open to everyone and is free. The event begins October 1st and it will last up to Halloween. 🎃
To encourage contributions to open source, they come with a simple challenge : made four quality pull requests to any GitHub public repository during the entire month. They do not even need to be accepted and merged to be counted, so you do not need to worry if a maintainer does not respond to your contribution.
The first edition was in 2014, and it is the seventh edition this year. In 2019, almost 500,000 pull requests were open and more than 60,000 people completed the challenge. 😲
How to participate
If you want to take part in the event, you only need to:
- Create a free account on GitHub, if you do not have one already.
- Sign up on the Hacktoberfest event page, to track your progress. You can register anytime between today and October 31st. 👻
- Code and make four pull requests to any public repository on GitHub. Any contribution counts in your total, as long it is a quality contribution. It could be to add a feature, to fix a bug or to improve the documentation.
If you have questions about Hacktoberfest, take a look at the official FAQ, it is pretty completed. 🙋
Rewards 🏆
If you successfully complete the challenge, DigitalOcean will reward you for contributing to the open source community with some swag : some stickers and a beautiful, and comfortable, t-shirt like the ones that I received these past years. 👕
Shortly after the event ended, all participants should receive an email to choose their swag. The participants will have the option to choose the t-shirt colour (white or blue) or, a novelty this year, to donate a tree in the Hacktoberfest forest on Tree-Nation. 🌳
If you decide to take the t-shirt, but still want to compensate your carbon emissions, you can plant a tree on your own on Tree-Nation.
In the same email, DigitalOcean will ask for your postal address, for the sole purpose of receiving your swag. It is free of charge, even international shipping! 📦
Personal goals 🚩
As sometimes I contribute to open source projects (like sherby-metadata), I would like to spice up the challenge. Above all, I think that it would not even be a challenge for me, as last year I quickly completed it under a week.
Therefore, I decided to raise my challenge by adding some other goals that I would like to achieve during this month:
- ✔ Promote Hacktoberfest with a post. I hope you enjoy the post you are currently reading. 😉
- Donate to the Eleventy project on Open Collective. 💰 I believe Eleventy, the static site generator I use on this website, is really great and I am genuinely looking forward to having more functionalities developed.
- Create and publish two NPM packages. I did some nice features for my blog that I think that would be beneficial to the Eleventy community. But, as they are really coupled with my source code, they will need some refactoring and, mostly, documentation with examples. 😇
- Write at least 15 minutes by day and publish one post a week. ✍️ I am currently trying to start a writing habit and according to the literature, it takes 21 days to incorporate something as a habit. So, at the end of the month, I hope that it would be easier for me to write about everything that I love in technologies.
Will you tackle the Hacktoberfest 2020 challenge? 💪
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