Jess Lee for The DEV Team

Posted on Oct 2, 2020

Happy Hacktoberfest! 🎃

#hacktoberfest #opensource #meta #contributorswanted

For the past seven years, @DigitalOcean has hosted Hacktoberfest: a community-wide celebration of open source.

Here's how to participate and a few details:

Sign up to participate
Make at least four pull requests (PRs).
PRs can be made in any participating GitHub-hosted repository/project
Your PRs will count toward your participation if they are in a repo with the hacktoberfest topic and once they have been merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as hacktoberfest-accepted.
Maintainers can opt-in to participate by classifying their projects with the hacktoberfest topic (find a list of opted-in projects here )
Any PR with the hacktoberfest-accepted label, submitted to any public GitHub repository, with or without the hacktoberfest topic, will be considered valid.

* Updated October 5

Before diving into the fun, please read our note about PR etiquette to ensure that you're making meaningful and valuable contributions this month.

Through your participation, you'll boost your open source cred and possibly earn some awesome Hacktoberfest rewards. We’re particularly excited that Hacktoberfest is offering a plant-a-tree alternative prize for those who want to forgo a shirt in favor of helping the planet. 💚

DEV is proud to be a co-host of Hacktoberfest for the second year in a row! That means when you get your SWAG pack, it will include DEV prizes, too! You'll also get a special Hacktoberfest 2020 badge for your DEV profile when you complete those four valid PRs.

Read on for more details.

Hacktoberfest 2020 — Who's looking for contributors?

dev.to staff for The DEV Team ・ Sep 17 '20

#hacktoberfest #opensource #discuss #contributorswanted

As a contributor, it’s important to do your research on what projects are actively looking for contributions and this thread is a resource for that.

As a maintainer, be sure to[add hacktoberfest as a topic to your repo in order to opt-in for Hacktoberfest contributions this month. If you don’t, participant’s PRs will not count towards their four PR-goal -- and your project won’t benefit from their additions.

Here’s how to classify your project as Hacktoberfest-eligible:

⭐ Share your Hacktoberfest progress, discuss, and get help

Tell us when you've completed all PRs in this thread
Discuss your experience or ask/answer a question about Hacktoberfest in this thread

⭐ Contribute to Forem!

As an open source organization, Forem is actively seeking contributors, too! We'd love to make your list of projects to contribute to this year!

Learn all about our projects here:

Contribute to Forem this Hacktoberfest!

Christina Gorton for The DEV Team ・ Oct 2 '20

#opensource #meta #hacktoberfest #contributorswanted

Notes on Hacktoberfest Etiquette for Contributors

This year, DigitalOcean has heard from a number of maintainers that they have been experiencing a number of low-quality and spammy pull requests on the first day of Hacktoberfest. This causes a headache for the hard-working maintainers who have to spend their valuable time reviewing PRs and flagging contributions as spam.

We encourage everyone to read this guide on how to be as helpful and respectful as possible when submitting pull requests:

Hacktoberfest Etiquette for Contributors

Christina Gorton for The DEV Team ・ Oct 1 '20

#hacktoberfest #opensource

We can't wait to read about your projects, contributions, and questions and couldn't be more excited to give open source the celebration it deserves... a global one!

If you have any questions or need help, feel free to leave them in the help and discussion thread.

Happy coding!

Oldest comments (44)

Dipti Gautam • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

Hii there! I'm organizing a local Hacktoberfest event from my community, Nepali Women in Computing, and we are looking for speakers! (Preferably women and non binaries)
The number of women in tech is in itself too few, and in my community, I can literally count in hands the number of women I have seen contributing in open source (and even I'm not one of them), so I am taking this as more of an opportunity to start the conversation, and introduce the culture for us to get into open source and start contributing for the sake of contributing to a community rather than complete pull requests for a t-shirt (Sorry, I don't mean to discourage Hacktoberfest, rather addressing that the community isn't there yet that the event would help get the pull requests, and that we should work on the foundations first).
My main target groups are students who are in final years of college, and early career graduates at their first jobs, or who are in the process of finding their first jobs, to get exposed to open source, so they can get this experience and leverage this thing for the professional experiences that they don't yet have, which the jobs would usually demand. And of course, develop the sense of belonging.

So, if anyone would like to share and support us, we are organizing an event on 18th October. Please help us find relevant speakers and get the word out! Thanks a lot!

[EDIT: We might be taking this event beyond Hacktoberfest, and maybe even beyond October so it's not lost in the temporary hype for this month, and give us more time to plan properly. Please reply to this comment or reach out to me via twitter if you'd like to speak and/or collaborate!]

Gursimir • Oct 9 '20

Dear Dipti,
I love your idea to motivate and support women to be into the tech field. I wanted to be a part of the event. I am open to all type of responsibilities. I am a final year computer science student.
It would be very great of you if you give me this opportunity.

Dipti Gautam • Oct 9 '20

Hi, you can help us find speakers! :)

Lakshya Singh • Oct 3 '20

the link to this note isn't

Mike Rogers ✈️ • Oct 3 '20

github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberf... - Here is the PR I think it means to link to.

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Oct 3 '20

Sorry, y'all! Fixed!

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Oct 3 '20

Updated! Our apologies!

Fernando B 🚀 • Oct 3 '20

They should also add rules against making PRs on your own repos if they haven't already done that.

Yasio • Oct 3 '20

Hey. Check out coders-railroad, a fun Hacktoberfest project. Add your cart to the HF2020 train by learning how and submitting a PR :) 🚂

YasiOnFire / coders-railroad

Fun Hacktoberfest project

CodersRailroad 🚂

This is a simple project made for Hactoberfest 2020. An easy entry to Pull Requests. You can add your cart to the HF2020 train by submitting a PR.

See the train in action: >>> coders-railroad.netlify.app/ <<<

How to contribute?

Fork repo
Clone your fork
Run yarn
Add your cart to src/assets/data.json and run yarn serve to see your cart
Run yarn test:unit
Create your branch, commit, push, create pull request

Cart config example:

{
  "name": "YasiOnFire"
  "text": "Yasio"
  "cart": 1
}

property	description
`name`	your Github name
`text`	your message to show on cart (max 18 chars)
`cart`	# of cart to use (see below)

Avaiable carts:

__.oO.oOo.oOo.oOo.__
|                  | 
|        #0        | 
"OO--------------OO"=
                      
_____________________ 
|                   | 
|        #1         | 
"OO---------------OO"=
  ________________
 |                |  
 |                |  
_|       #2       |_ 
"OO--------------OO"=
      _________
 ____||_______||____

…

View on GitHub

Ramy Gamal • Oct 3 '20

please read "this note" from DigitalOcean for more information on how those will be treated.

In this part of the post the this note link doesn't redirect to a DigitalOcean blog or post could you fix that?

Thanks!

Ramy Gamal • Oct 3 '20

hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hac...

I found it, I think this is the link of the post.

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Oct 3 '20

Fixed! Thanks for pointing this out :)

vuong ⛈️ • Oct 3 '20

It's hard to have a contribution to an OSS, I swear! So I hope if anyone receives so many spams because of this event, please be patient and try to keep it more simple. Not about the T-shirt, your answer to any spam PR can make people understand why they need to complete their PR with high responsibility. Can! Can!
Cheers!

Aleksandr Hovhannisyan • Oct 3 '20

Happy DDoSfest!

Taikon • Oct 3 '20

@jess Just to clarify, I made a few PRs that were merged already when Hacktoberfest started. But none of them have the hacktoberfest label on it. You're saying that they won't count is that right? Thanks.

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Oct 3 '20 • Edited

Hello! Here is the language from DigitalOcean's recent statement:

"We will honor all valid pull requests prior to this change, and as of October 3, 2020 at 12:00:00 UTC – and October 3 in all time zones – pull requests will only count toward earning a T-shirt or planting a tree if they are submitted in a repository classified with the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic. The pull requests will also need to be merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ in order to qualify. The deadline for completions, merging, labeling, and approving is November 1."

Alex Boutin • Oct 3 '20

It's my first year in Hacktoberfest and I must say that I like the idea, but I have to say I'm disappointed to discover only today that the rules have changed for the selected repositories. When I started preparing for HacktoberFest, I found one project and I made some PR, even found it trough the ressources available on the website to find open source project. And today, I have my 4 PR, but all this work was for nothing in the end, because I have to now find another (Or 4. projects) in the new list that was release on the second day of the event.... Kind of disappointing....

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Oct 3 '20 • Edited

Hi Alex! I totally hear your frustration over the rule-change. This happened to address maintainer concerns and the organizers hope it will make the overall Hacktoberfest experience more valuable for everyone.

I did want to share some info that might bring you some relief!

"We will honor all valid pull requests prior to this change, and as of October 3, 2020 at 12:00:00 UTC – and October 3 in all time zones – pull requests will only count toward earning a T-shirt or planting a tree if they are submitted in a repository classified with the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic. The pull requests will also need to be merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ in order to qualify. The deadline for completions, merging, labeling, and approving is November 1."

-DigitalOcean's recent statement

So, if you submitted a valid PR that was approved by a maintainer, merged, or labeled as Hacktoberfest-classified, it will count!

Hope you have a great weekend. And thanks for being part of the DEV community 🙂

Meghan (she/her) • Oct 3 '20

Hacktoberfest may just be more bad than it is good

Rafid Ahmed • Oct 4 '20

Hey, I am having a problem with the fest. It's my first time participating. Yesterday I got a Successful pull request and it showed on my hacktober fest profile/progress. But now it is back to 0.
WHY IS THAT? Can anybody clarify my problem?

Tushar Tyagi • Oct 5 '20 • Edited

I'm assuming this is because of new rules. Due to high number of spam PRs this hacktoberfest, contributions to only certain repositories (which have opted-in for hacktoberfest) will be counted. hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hac...

chandan0000 • Oct 4 '20

thanks

Justin Mitchell • Oct 4 '20

Looks like dev.to been copping some hacktoberfest spam 👀

Tunde Oretade • Oct 4 '20

I have a question, please. What happens when you change the github access token to the repo that was recently registered for #Hacktoberfest? seems like PRs get rejected because of this. Is there any way to fix it?