As each year goes by, October is a month that I truly look forward to as a developer. For the past five years, DigitalOcean has been involved in running a month-long celebration of open source software along with other companies in technology. Developers from all around the world contribute to open source projects on Github ranging from new features, bug fixes, and yes even fixing up spelling typos. More importantly, upon completing 5 pull requests, DigitalOcean has an incentive for participants who make 5 pull requests – you receive a free t-shirt along with stickers to add to your shiny laptop! It’s a form of validation for all the work that you’ve contributed to the community and maybe some street cred as well.
I began participating since last year as a way to get more involved within the community. It allows me to look at how others have setup their projects, look at build processes, and try my hands at something I wouldn’t normally do with my own projects.
Being a past participant, I wanted to share some tips that might be useful to those considering Hacktoberfest for the first time:
- If you aren’t familiar with using Git, consider going through Github’s tutorial: https://try.github.io. It will save you a lot of time in the end. Github’s desktop client is a great way to make pull requests if you aren’t comfortable running commands in the terminal.
- Look through the open issues tracker on Github or the Hacktoberfest homepage for a particular project written in the language of your choice that you would be interested in contributing to. I usually look at projects written in Javascript or PHP.
- Read the repository’s README to get a feel for the project and decide if it’s something you want to contribute to. It might also include additional information about getting setup locally or configuring the compiling/build process.
- Consider making more than 5 pull requests.
Happy hacking and have fun!