Hacktoberfest Guide for Beginners

#hacktoberfest #opensource #github #beginners

Everyone is talking about Hacktober Fest & Free T-shirts. But what exactly Hacktoberfest is & how can you participate to win that fancy limited edition T-Shirt? If you have these questions in your mind, you are in the right place. Stick to this blog post & at the end of it, you will have all the answers.

So let's begin!

What is HacktoberFest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long community event in October where people from all sorts of professions come to help each other to learn & share new skills through contributing to open-source projects and to support the open-source community. Participants also win awesome swag like the T-Shirt we just mentioned.

The main aim of Hacktoberfest is to encourage people to contribute more to open source projects.

If you don't know what are open source projects, open-source projects are the projects where anyone can make their own contributions through various means regardless of their relation to the project or to the project owners.

Anyone can participate in Hacktoberfest & it is not at all mandatory to have any experience or knowledge in coding.

Are there any Prerequisites?

The contributions for Hacktoberfest takes place through Git & GitHub, so you need to have some basic knowledge of Git & Github. You don't really have to learn everything about them. Well, if you know how to make a pull request, then you already have sufficient knowledge required for Hacktoberfest.

But if you don't, below are some useful resources for you to learn and master Git & GitHub in no time:

Apart from the basic knowledge of Git & GitHub, you don't really need to have any other skill to get started.

You can contribute with whatever skills you currently have. No need to learn something new (although it's always good to learn new stuff)...

Below are some of the different ways in which you can contribute:

Code - The most obvious way to contribute to a project is coding. However, you don't have to be a professional programmer or Mr Robot to help open source community.
Design - You can also help by designing or redesigning project assets like landing pages, UI or illustrations. Possibilities are endless here!
Review - You can also help by checking the project code & can suggest better ways of implementing the same logic or help the owner to find & fix bugs in the project.
Documentation - One of the easiest yet important way of contributing to a project is to add documentation to the project or help improve the current documentation.

How to get started?

Here are detailed step by step instructions:

Step 1 - Register yourself for Hacktoberfest

Registration is pretty simple!

Go to official Hacktoberfest website
Click on Start Hacking & sign in with your GitHub account

That's it! You are now officially registered for Hacktoberfest 2020!

Step 2 - Find repositories to make contributions

Now next step is to find a repository of your choice which matches your skill set, it could be any repository on GitHub labelled as hacktoberfest.

You can find the label on the right-hand section of repository page under About section. If the hacktoberfest label is not present, it means that any contributions you make to this particular repository will not be counted for Hacktoberfest 2020.

Here are some of the repositories I recommend to beginners:

Step 3 - Start Hacking/Contributing

Now once you have found the repositories you want to contribute into. It's now time to actually start hacking(contributing).

Here are few points, you should keep in mind:

Throughout the month of October, you have to make at least 4 valid pull requests in any repository on GitHub which is labelled hacktoberfest as previously mentioned.
The pull requests you have made will have to go through a review process of 14 Days. You can check the status of your pull requests from here.
Within that 14 Day review process, the repository owner will have a chance to see & evaluate your pull requests, if everything goes well & all 4 of your pull requests got accepted then after 14 days you will receive an email from Hacktoberfest organizers to claim your prize.
In case, any of your pull requests wasn't accepted, you can try again to make more valid pull requests to different repositories before the end of Hacktoberfest 2020 (i.e. before October 30).
I recommend you to make as many contributions as you can on multiple repositories, as this will increase the number of pull requests you have made & eventually your chances of completing Hacktoberfest 2020 challenge will increase as well!

Congratulations! You are now all set to participate in Hacktoberfest 2020!

Join our Telegram group which we have specially created to help beginners with Hacktoberfest 2020!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in comments, I'll be there to help & guide you throughout your Hacktoberfest journey.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope I have covered everything required for you to get started with Hacktoberfest & win that awesome limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt. I will keep this blog post updated with the latest updates & news about Hacktoberfest. Feel free to give your feedback & constructive criticism in the comments section.

Stay Safe, everyone!