DEV Community: Nischal Jain

Hacktoberfest 2023 Swags Compilation. Do not give up on T Shirts yet!

Nischal Jain — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 18:50:03 +0000

Hacktoberfest, an annual event that celebrates open source contributions, has become popular not only for its focus on OSS contributions but also for the swag rewards participants receive. While the official Hacktoberfest t-shirts have been discontinued from this year, there are still numerous projects and organisations that offer swag rewards for participants in Hacktoberfest 2023. Here is an exhaustive collection of such projects and organisations along with relevant links. Master list at the end!

Collectiv AI: Collectiv is an AI platform made for helping developers contribute to open source projects by helping them in searching and understanding the code as they start out with an unfamiliar repo of an OSS project. Collectiv already helps more than 10,000 developers contribute to over 2000+ projects. We will send out a swag kit with a cool t-shirt if you use collectiv to understand the codebase and contribute during Hacktoberfest 2023. Best part is you can use Collectiv to contribute and win merch from the other organisations mentioned below in the list! Checkout details here.
Cloudinary: Cloudinary is an image and video API platform. They have made a lot of their SDKs and Libraries open for contributions. They will ship out a T Shirt, some stickers and a cloudinary unicorn. You can find out more details here.
Flyte: Flyte helps building production-grade data and ML workflows. They are giving out merch to some serious contributors who make educational content about Flyte. If you are passionate about ML workflows, this could be for you. More details here.
UNO Platform: If you are a .NET developer than UNO could be the project for you. UNO is an open-source developer productivity platform for building single-codebase native mobile, web, desktop and embedded apps. Sweaters, T-shirts and more is in the store for participants! Checkout details here.
ServiceNow: ServiceNow is a SaaS platform providing multiple IT offerings for businesses. They are participating in Hacktoberfest 2023 and shipping merch till stick last. Some details here.
MASTER LIST- Check out https://hacktoberfestswaglist.com/. This project culminates the above and many more orgs that are going above and beyond this hacktoberfest! You can get tons of swags from these orgs!!

So let's get to hacking & get those PRs merged!! 🚀 🥳

Originally published on Collectiv's Blog

How can Hacktoberfest 2023 be a turning point in your OSS journey & why AI is crucial to it.

Nischal Jain — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 06:53:50 +0000

Hacktoberfest - the popular month-long event that encourages developers (especially students and newbies) worldwide to contribute to open-source - is entering its 10th edition this October.

Over the last ten years, the core motto has been to celebrate open source, make more people contribute, and make software better for everyone. The benefits of contributing to open-source are widely known and evident, one being a higher preference in job applications.

Everyone loves open source, but only some are ready to take the plunge and give their valuable time. Why?

Why are not many people able to meaningfully contribute to open-source?

I believe the reason is based on a base class of the human algorithm: laziness. And when you extend that base class with a friction class, evidence starts to reveal itself. Let me explain this non-programmatically.

When you jump to a new codebase, it takes a lot of effort to go through it, understand the nitty-gritty, and get yourself up to speed. Not to mention that you are not paid to do all of this. It’s a long journey that needs a lot of patience.

You ask questions in the community but get replies after days; you read the docs, but they are outdated; you try to read the code, but there is so much abstraction that it is difficult to wrap your head around it. And if, in some manner, you are able to raise a PR to an issue, it might never even get merged because an overburdened maintainer didn’t get time to go through yet another PR.

So, what's the solution?

The question arises as to how can we weed out this difficult onboarding? Let’s start with making the process a little less frictionless and easier. If we address the root cause, gradually more people will get a strong hold on the codebase, eventually graduating to become maintainers and reducing the burden on the existing few. I know the picture looks too rosy to be true, but it could very well be - someday.

This Hacktoberfest could be a good start. Rather than taking up issues based on ease, take up issues a bit more impactful. They could still be beginner-level issues, but they could be much more impactful than just doing language corrections in docs and calling yourself a serial OSS contributor. Not to put it wrongly, language corrections are essential - the intent here is to make more impact on the ultimate source of truth - the codebase.

How can AI help?

Especially now that AI tools like co-pilot have made generating code a cakewalk, I feel the next frontier is to really make understanding code much easier. Pasting a code in ChatGPT will surely not enable you to understand the interdependencies of the functions. The answers are not high quality because of lack of context, and there are many unsolved challenges in the entire AI for code understanding stack. Think about code as not files of text but as a graph with tons of interdependence between various components, and the existing RAG approaches will feel lackluster. I see a good attempt here at Collectiv, but there are still many challenges to crack.

This Hacktoberfest needs not to be just about newbies but about everyone who wants to contribute to more projects and make more impact in the world with open-source software.

A good AI twin can be the next leap in the open-source world.

PS - We are giving out a cool merch kit to everyone who makes contributions to OSS this October. Checkout more details here at Collectiv X Hacktoberfest

TLDR -

Fill the form indicating your participation
Use Collectiv to understand the codebase around the GitHub issue.
Get 4 PRs merged in any repo > 100 stars.

At the end of Hacktoberfest, we'll verify your contributions and ship the merch!

Originally published in Collectiv's Blog

Hacktoberfest 2023 - How AI can create an impact on Open Source Contributions

Nischal Jain — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 11:53:16 +0000

The dark side of Hacktoberfest

Over the years, Hacktoberfest has garnered a lot of criticism from the open-source maintainer community. Primarily driven by the idea of getting their hands on a cool T-shirt, a large number of students flock to Hacktoberfest to submit tons of PRs, get any four accepted and be done with it. There is always a tussle to find the easiest issues and not meaningful ones.

This is so evident that in 2020, there was a major outrage in the community named #Shitoberfest. Projects that used to be involved in Hacktoberfest in the past are no longer a part. Hacktoberfest just adds more burden to the already burdened life of OSS maintainers. But the problem of open-source maintainers go beyond just Hacktoberfest. Maintainer mental health is highly overlooked, and people forget maintainers are doing open-source for free alongside a job that earns them bread. Some maintainers have gone so far as to quit open source.

This year, Hacktoberfest had to remove the T-shirt prize officially. This move was made to make the event more environment friendly by eliminating the logistics of shipping 50,000 T-shirts worldwide. But, I feel an un-disclosed reason to take the T Shirt away is to make more people contribute for the REAL cause of Hacktoberfest - which is celebrating the spirit of open source and bringing in more contributors.

What about new people who genuinely want to contribute?

Hacktoberfest was made to make OSS contributions more accessible and popular. Then what went wrong? Why people just flocked to do small changes and not meaningful ones, even though there used to be a T Shirt prize that motivated to take on tough challenges?

To me, the overall ecosystem does not look very welcoming/ accessible for beginners. Sure, there are issues labeled as good-first-issue, but no one talks about how to get started with a huge codebase or is there to assist you. Meaningfully contributing is a hard path that needs tons of patience. You rely on the community to answer your questions, which again leads to a burden on the maintainers who have to repeatedly answer the same kind of questions. Beginners often find themselves going through docs (which we know are not so well-maintained), and there is a lot of tribal knowledge that only a few maintainers know about. Ask someone who wants to contribute to an ASF project, and you will know the extent to which the tribal knowledge exists.

In such scenarios, I really don't think contributing to OSS is highly welcoming.

How to solve this chicken-egg problem?

It feels like there is a huge gap that AI platforms made specifically for navigating, understanding, and contributing to open-source projects can solve here.

It can help maintainers in doing AI-enabled PR reviews (at least about general best practices already followed in the repo) & save a lot of maintainer bandwidth. This can also bring down some of the toxicity that comes from frustrations of reviewing PRs of “noobs"

On the other hand, such tools can serve as valuable co-pilot for people starting out by helping people truly understand the codebase and the interdependencies. This can enable many more people to make impactful contributions than simple typo corrections.

AI has been shaping how we have been writing code, but it is still not solving human challenges that we face while collaborating during software development, at least not in open-source - which kind of runs the world.

Collectiv X Hacktoberfest 2023

We at Collectiv are trying to encourage more and more people this hacktoberfest to make meaningful contributions to open-source. Collectiv is an AI tool meant for understanding & contributing to OSS projects. More than 10,000 devs already use collectiv to make contributions to open-source! We are also giving some cool merch to all the contributors who make such meaningful contributions this October. Checkout more details on my other post to save your merch!

Originally published on Collectiv's blog.

Hacktoberfest 2023 registrations start! - The complete guide to win a T Shirt, Learn and Contribute.

Nischal Jain — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 10:48:05 +0000

Just like the last 10 years, the tradition of hacktoberfest continues - an amazing celebration of open source!

If you don’t already know about it, chances are you are new to open-source ecosystem. You should definitely have a read about how open source can change you career trajectory.

This brief guides will be helpful to you across your hacktoberfest journey. So hopefully you'll read it till the end :D

Here's what is covered -

How to get started with Hacktoberfest 👋
Useful resources to kickstart your hacktoberfest journey 🚀
Prizes for hacktoberfest 🏆
How to win a T-Shirt even when its discontinued in Hacktoberfest 2023? 👕
The dark side of hacktoberfest 🔴
Interesting communities to join 👥
Fun & Learnings in open-source 🥳🤩

How to get started with Hacktoberfest 👋

The registrations for hacktoberfest 2023 have already started and you can visit the official website to register yourself asap. The last day to register is Oct 31 so do not wait. You might also want to register for Collectiv x Hacktoberfest. More details on it later in the post. The rules are simple - raise PRs to any hacktoberfest labelled repository. If any 4 PRs get merged, you have successfully completed the hacktoberfest challenge! Isn’t that simple?

Useful resources to kickstart your hacktoberfest journey 🚀

If you are a beginner in development or newly starting out your OSS journey, you might face some challenges. Biggest one could be how to find the issues that you can solve 😮‍💨

Here are some resources to land you some good issues & to get you across your OSS journey.

Find an issue to solve at First Issue - This website curates accessible issues from popular open-source projects, and helps you make your next contribution to open-source.
Learn the Do's and Don'ts of OSS Contributions - This guide is a very good collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open-source project.
Official Hacktoberfest 2023 website - You can find exciting events and more resources related to hacktoberfest here.
Collectiv AI - Collectiv helps you tackle a bigger problem once you have found the issue you want to solve. How do you even get started with an unfamiliar codebase? Collectiv helps you to have an AI assistant on top of any codebase that can help you understand the code, generate better documentation it and continuously help you as you solve the issues!

Prizes for Hacktoberfest 🏆

Unlike the last 9 editions of hacktoberfest, sadly this time you do not get a T-Shirt when your 4 PRs get merged. There’s an entire explanation on the same on the official website. However, you get a tree planted in your name if you are one of the first 50,000 participants to get 4 PRs accepted. There are also digital reward kits for everyone.

How to win a T-Shirt even when its discontinued in Hacktoberfest 2023? 👕

There are still ways in which you can get that T-Shirt when your participate in Hacktoberfest 2023.

Collectiv - an AI tool built to search & understand unfamiliar codebases is sponsoring merch for all the hacktoberfest participants who use Collectiv to solve issues and raise PRs 🥳

Why would you want to use an AI tool for your contribution you may ask? Well, when you jump into an unfamiliar OSS codebase, you will find yourself searching for a lot of answers about how something in the codebase works, or going through the docs to understand the codebase, etc. Collectiv’s AI can help you do all that just by asking it questions much like you would on ChatGPT.

The best part is Collectiv is made specifically for code, has the latest context of every codebase, unlike cutoff of 2021 for ChatGPT. More than 10,000 devs already use Collectiv to search, understand and contribute to 2000+ OSS projects. ✅

You can check out more details here. Fill this form, use collectiv for solving issues and Collectiv will send some cool merch wherever you are in the world!

The dark side of hacktoberfest 🔴

A lot of us miss this out, but hacktoberfest has also garnered some bad reputation over the years. Refer to this post on HN to know more.

TLDR is that a lot of people raise spammy PRs, just to get their hands on a T-Shirt as fast as possible. It does not drive any meaningful contributions to OSS and make the life of already strained maintainers even tougher. This could also be one of the reasons why T Shirts were continued.

Hacktoberfest organisers have take various steps to reduce spammy PRs and eliminate bad actors from the system. On similar lines, we at Collectiv also believe that there is a lot more to the tradition of hacktoberfest than T Shirts.

We hope that now with an AI expert sitting right beside every dev who’s participating in hacktoberfest, it will become easier and more accessible to make higher impact and more meaningful contributions than doing simple documentation changes, not that they are any less important. But you get the intent. So this hacktoberfest, let’s really try to make meaningful contributions, whether you’re using AI or not.

Interesting communities to join 👥

Hacktoberfest is fun I heard? Yesss! It is damn fun. You can hangout with people from all across the world in various communities, made especially for hacktoberfest. You can join Hacktoberfest’s Official Discord channel.
At Collectiv, we are hosting multiple hangouts sessions and have a dedicated channel for all hacktoberfest participants! Join Collectiv’s Discord and be updated on all our swag announcements, hacktoberfest resources and also get help from our team in your OSS contribution journey. We are always looking to hangout with you!

Fun & Learning in open-source 🥳🤩

At the end of the day, open source is all about making a positive impact on the world, with software and collaboration. It’s a gateway to learn so much more than taught in traditional programming courses. You meet a bunch of amazing people in the journey and have tons of fun building cool stuff. I really don’t think any developer today in the world can do their work without open source software. Let’s make this hacktoberfest an amazing testament to the spirit of open-source!!

Lessgoooo hack!! Originally published on Collectiv's Blog

Hacktoberfest 2023 t-shirts are NOT entirely gone!

Nischal Jain — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 14:23:35 +0000

Yes, you read it right. You can still participate in Hacktoberfest, make meaningful contributions, and stand a chance to win some cool swags (from Collectiv) It's our version of enabling more and more developers to contribute to open source and still keep the excitement of getting t-shirts alive one more year :D

What is Collectiv?

Collectiv is a platform that helps thousands of developers from across the globe to work with OSS repos. Developers use collectiv to search, understand, and contribute to 2000+ open source codebases. Check it out here at - https://chat.collectivai.com

One of the biggest problems with open-source contributions, especially for those just starting out, is understanding the complex codebase. You find yourself going through tons of code, docs or relying on someone in the community to address your doubts.

Let's admit it: contributing to open source is complicated and a craft mastered over time with patience. We can at least make it a bit easier. AI tools get all the rage for doing more harm than good, especially when it comes to coding related tasks. Collectiv challenges that. It's not made for a fancy prototype, but a reliable system that can help you search and understand a codebase.

So how does collectiv x hacktoberfest 2023 work?

Before I dig deeper, I want to clarify that this is not "official" hacktoberfest merch (because there isn't any this time :p), but collectiv merch that you get when you contribute to open source in the month of october!

It's simple: make four meaningful (read non-spam) contributions to any repo with >100 stars and fill out this really simple form. We will verify and ship a really cool merch kit anywhere you are in the world!

Hacktoberfest has been infamous for spamming the maintainer community for many low-quality contributions. We sincerely hope that now, with collectiv, even beginners can take up a bit more challenging issues that make an impact on the OSS ecosystem.

So, gear up for an exciting month full of fun, learning, and hacking this October! See you all at Hacktoberfest 2023 w/ Collectiv!!

Originally published on collectiv's blog.