On Wednesday, October 21, Ajaccio had its first Hacktoberfest. It was the only Hacktoberfest meetup in Corsica this year, and more than 40 people came to CampusPlex, in the middle of town, on a weekday evening.
GoodBarber, the company I work for, hosted it. I was just in the audience, with my phone out.
The talk: what does "open" mean in AI?
Baptiste Audroin, from the local company Kairo AI, gave the talk in French. He started with the concepts:
- Open-weight and open source: two terms almost everyone mixes up.
- Which model to pick for which job, and what actually runs on an ordinary machine.
- What you need to build around a model so it acts, instead of just answering.
Then he showed how Kairo AI uses open-weight models in its own work.
My takeaway: there's a gap, and in a way, we have to evangelize about AI. Burying your head in the sand gets you nowhere, and everyone needs to be brought along.
A Hacktoberfest without pull requests
If you haven't been following, Hacktoberfest 2026 no longer counts pull requests. The theme is open-source AI and open-weight models, and the point is to build something with open tools. On DEV, it takes the form of weekly challenges: Week 3, "Slow and Steady", is open until October 25, and Week 4 starts on October 26.
So an evening built around one talk fit right in. No PRs to count, no repos to hunt down.
The room
What I'll remember most is the people. A lot of them were interesting and, better still, interested.
The pizza
No photo of this one, so you'll have to trust me: it wasn't pizza with olives, it was olives with a pizza flavour. We're in Corsica, after all.
What's next
There will be a follow-up, though nobody knows yet what form it will take. If you're in Corsica, or just passing through, and want to hear about the next one, leave a comment. Anywhere else, hacktoberfest.com lists the Fests.
It felt good to be on the Hacktoberfest map. We're so small that usually, all you see is water.
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