What's Hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest is a month long journey many take to get a free t-shirt. Wait, no, it's a community gathering to support the open source community and projects. Every year, during the month of October, DigitalOcean hosts an event in which developers around the world join together to contribute to open source. You can contribute by submitting changes ranging in difficulty from fixing a typo to implementing a full-fledged feature on a project. As the official Hacktoberfest website says, "Quantity is fun, Quality is key."
I Want a Free T-Shirt, How Do I Participate?
It's coming up fast, your first step is to get acquainted with the process; "Hello Preptember." Preptember is just a fancy way of saying, start getting ready now, find open source projects you're interested in, and take a look at the issues.
- The first step would be to check out the official Hacktoberfest website.
- Register between September 26 and October 31.
- Any changes you make need to be in a pull request (PR) that is accepted by the project maintainers
- You officially "complete" Hacktoberfest by having 4 PRs accepted during the month of October, feel free to keep contributing though; it's fun!
- If you are one of the first 40,000 participants to complete Hacktoberfest, you receive a prize: a tree planted in your name or a t-shirt.
- Check out this link for more detail on participation. It covers everything from what is open source to how to submit a PR
How Do I Find Open Source Projects?
Take a look at github's #hacktoberfest topic to see all the repositories participating in Hacktoberfest; currently, there are almost 100,000 projects! You can filter by language to help focus on one you have more experience with or take this opportunity to work on a language you've wanted to learn.
You can also check your local community, many times there are maintainers or groups of developers hosting an event in your area.
But of course, why not check out OpenZiti hacktoberfest issues?