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Hacktoberfest Starts in Six Days 🎃🎉

Ben Halpern on September 25, 2019

For six years and counting, DigitalOcean has run a campaign throughout October to celebrate Open Source. To participate, you need to make at least...
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Peter Kim Frank

We are so excited be partners on this year's celebration alongside our friends at DigitalOcean! It's very cool to be part of something that helps get more people involved with open-source.

Looking forward to many interesting articles and discussions over in the #hacktoberfest tag!

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Jack Harner 🚀

Did my first Hacktoberfest last year with a PR to DEV! Really excited again for this year and it's so cool y'all can be a bigger part of it.

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Pierre Bouillon

YEAH !

I'm really keen to dive into this event once again ! It's one of the things that drove me to contribute to open-source and discover some things about it. It's awesome to see that my favorite community is also part of it ! 😄

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Igor Perikov

A nice time of the year, indeed ❤️I have created a program, which looks for beginner issues, so you might want to try it out - github.com/igorperikov/mighty-watcher. Repository itself is hacktoberfest-native, so you can contribute to it as well!

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Drew Bragg

So excited for this!

The past 2 years I haven't felt like I could make meaningful contributions (or at least couldn't find anything within my wheel house) but this year I actually feel confident that I could find and fix real issues!

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Kristen Kinnear-Ohlmann

I believe this is my 3rd year participating in Hacktoberfest. I hope to move beyond contributing revisions to freeCodeCamp knowledgebase articles and write some actual code!

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Brian Barbour

I've been super nervous to jump into open source, but this may be my chance.

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Johannes Lichtenberger

Every kind of contribution is special. For instance if you get your first typo fixes :-)

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Kelvin Wangonya

Excited to participate for the first time this year 😃

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Johannes Lichtenberger • Edited

That's so awesome. I just made a post about a Vue.js front-end I want to build and looking for help as I'm super new to the front-end stuff :-)

dev.to/johanneslichtenberger/searc...

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Thomas Bnt

Ooooh i'm so excited ! Hacktoberfest w/ dev.to ❤

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Keziah

This is awesome !
I hope I will have the time to contribute to some great projects :D

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Dzhavat Ushev

Exciting! I participated last year and am sooo much looking forward to this year.

As far as I can remember, last year everyone who made four PRs got a t-shirt, not only the first 50,000. They've changed it a bit for this year. But regardless, it's a great opportunity to get involved with open source. :)

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Takahiro Kudo

I'll participate for the first time! ☺️

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Nicole Peery 🌵

Hacktoberfest was a great confidence builder for me last year. Excited to participate again. 😁

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Jordon Replogle

My first time was last year, and I would really encourage anyone to join and participate.

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Nans Dumortier

I usually don't take too much of my time contributing to Open Source projects, but this month seems to be a great opportunity to start contributing!
Looking forward to see who I can help!
Understand this as "please, post some Contributors Wanted" articles guys 😁

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Pachi 🥑

Can we participate online? Also are newbies allowed? Lol

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Ben Halpern

Yes and yes!

It's all about open source contributing. Please find guides for newbies and then look for the issues. More guidance coming in the near future.

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Fernanda Luna • Edited

Hacktoberfest sounds amazing! I hope I can make my first contribution to open source, for the first time in my life. Really excited about it.
Great article btw!

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Saurabh Daware 🌻

This will be my first time participating in hacktoberfest and I'm super excited to explore some cool repositories on GitHub and have already planned some repos to contribute to :D

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John Carroll

More than a little surprised that the official rules require PRs to be on Github...a platform which isn't open source. Why aren't, for example, Gitlab PRs eligible? Is Github a sponser of the event? They aren't listed. Why was this decision made?

To qualify for the official limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt, you must register and make four pull requests (PRs) between October 1-31 (in any time zone). PRs can be made to any public repo on GitHub, not only the ones with issues labeled Hacktoberfest.

Separately, how do these rules apply to maintainers of open source projects? Do PRs count if they are made by a maintainer of a repo? The rules don't seem to indicate otherwise.

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Tim Downey

In the past the event has been clearly sponsored by Github. It is less clear if is is or not this year.

github.blog/2018-09-24-hacktoberfe...

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John Carroll

Gotcha. I imagine they are involved in some official capacity this year as well then.

It is strange to see Github attempting to "own" open source in this way though. Very antagonistic to the spirit of open source. Many of the projects I use are not hosted on Github, so this is an unfortunate decision (Ruby, Wordpress, Chromium, Firefox, Drupal, etc). Though it makes sense when viewed as an ad campaign.

I guess what annoys me about this is the branding as an "open source" event. I don't see it as an open source event, I see it as a Github event which happens to help open source. The github equivalent of a retailer donating some-percent of a purchase to charity.

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Fernando Crozetta

This will be my first time in the hacktoberfest... I'm not really confident about it, but I think the experience will help me build up my confidence (maybe?)

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Anshul Chauhan

I am excited. I finally have a reason to step out of my comfort zone and beat the imposter syndrome. I believed that I have to be an expert to be able to contribute even slightly to other's code. I hope to find out that I too can help out.

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Matteo Joliveau

We're hosting some awesome communities in Milan to spend a full Saturday coding and learning open source.

If you happen to be in town on Saturday 5th, come join us!
meetup.com/it-IT/Open-Source-Satur...

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Nihar Raote • Edited

It is a month-long event held in October, where you submit 5 pull requests (doesn't matter whether they get accepted or not) to either your own repos or someone else's, though, it's preferable to submit to someone else's repo.
As Ben said, the first 5000 people to complete this challenge will get some stickers, a limited edition T-shirt and other swag.

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Marvin

Ben had it at 50,000

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Louis

I just signed up for it and wonder if it would count if I committed any pull requests before the 1st of october, as I've already got my profile and stuff set up?

Does it track every PR during my period logged in or just those that are happening exactly between October 1st an 31st?

I would really like to start of right now, but I'm afraid that my PR's were not going to be counted.

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Alexander Seiler

It's simple, only PRs opened between October 1st and October 31st will count. You can still start right now, work on something, but wait until October 1st to open the PR.

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Grant Shangreaux

I'm excited to participate in my first #hacktoberfest, as well as join the community here at DEV! I had been a free software user for a long time before I made my first code contribution, I know all the roadblocks that can get in the way of even trying ;)

For those new to it, I recommend looking at the issue boards on GitHub for tools you use already and might know something about. I'm an Emacs user, so many of my contributions revolve around that. Its easier when you have some context for the software you're using.

Look for places in the documentation that could be fixed, try to help someone in a chat or stack overflow and see if that leads to something you can fix in code. Ask questions, find a community willing to help you help :)

I plan to make some posts throughout the month talking about the process of identifying issues I can take on in the small amounts of time I have, and (hopefully) how to work through the issue and make a meaningful contribution. A little bit goes a long way in a public good like free software, so find the little bit you can do!

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Michael Harding

This will be my first time participating, but also is my first time really going for trying to contribute with code in the OSS space. I'm both excited and terrified

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Seanmclem

When working with a repo - how do you usually find their issue/PR templates.

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Martín Emanuel • Edited

Just found out about this and wow, it sounds very cool! Hope to find some interesting Rust/Haskell projects.

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SH • Edited

Hi, I started to learn coding 14 months ago and have some basic understanding of CSS, JS and GIT. I would like to participate to gain experience. Does anyone have good recommendations for beginners?

 
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Nihar Raote

Ah, my bad. Missed a zero there.

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Derk-Jan Karrenbeld
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Nihar Raote

Nice to see Dev is going to be a part of it. This will be my 3rd Hacktober.

Looking forward to another t-shirt and those dev stickers 🤤

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kahama94 • Edited

Hey help here. I opened a pr that has my commits and a fellow colleague commits then I saw the creating a pr from someone else's branch is disruptive. How can I remove this pr from my hacktoberfest account. Since am seeing it already being tracked on my profile. Thanks

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Jatin Aggarwal

Can someone please tell the eligible repos this year. As i have made 15 prs but out which 9 prs have been declared as ineligible repo. So can anyone please help me with this?