Hacking the Hacktoberfest! || Hacktoberfest 2022

Hacking the Hacktoberfest! || Hacktoberfest 2022

Code, Low-code and Non-Code Contributions for hacktoberfest 2022

Wishing luck to all the maintainers and creators!

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Hacktoberfest: About the Event

You might have seen people talking, shouting, holding Twitter spaces and even making videos hyping the Hacktoberfest, but, what is it?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event by Digital Ocean which is held once annually to promote contribution to OpenSource! This event runs in October - and so the name. The main motive is to put the repositories out there to give them a showcase so their overall code and software/app/project can be made better. A lot of projects which are developed also open up for documentation and testing and thus giving everyone a chance to learn and grow.

Hacktoberfest provides an opportunity to earn swag by getting at least 4PRs accepted and then submitting these accepted to the website!

The official website for Hacktoberfest is here. Do not forget to sign-up, registration starts on the 26th of September! (Registrations have started!)

Participating in Hacktoberfest

It is seriously very easy to participate in Hacktoberfest. All you do is a code, no-code or maybe low-code contribution which provides some value to the project.

  • You can enhance a feature
  • Help with the documentation
  • Write a blog post about them
  • Fix a code
  • Add a new feature . . .

The possibilities of adding value are endless, all you have to do is find that valuable thing you can provide.

Hacktoberfest is allowing low-code and non-code contributions this time promoting the overall theme that OpenSource is literally for everyone!

To Participate:

  1. Open a GitHub Account - if you don't have one
  2. Find a project to which you would like to contribute to - This can be according to your programming interest or according to the type of contribution
  3. Open an issue or find an issue to work on
  4. Get yourself assigned this issue - just so you don't clash your work with someone and two people don't work on the same thing
  5. Work on this issue
  6. Open a Pull Request
  7. You have made your first Hacktoberfest contribution!

While participating please see that:

  • Don't work on something that has been assigned to someone else
  • If the repository isn't the best for you, move to another one rather than making useless requests

Some Resources if you are contributing to OpenSource for the very first time:

  1. EddieHub's Hacktoberfest-Practice
  2. OpenSource with Pradumna
  3. Earn your First Green Square - A blog by Me

Code Contributions during Hacktoberfest:

If you know any programming language, then code contributions are your way to go this year. A few thoughts for contribution:

  • Fix the code which has been written
  • Add some functionality which could provide value to the repository
  • Look through issues and find a bug which you can fix
  • If you find a bug, raise an issue and then fix it
  • Helping with a larger part of the code If you can make the code better for any repositories, that would be helpful to them!

Low-Code and Non-Code Contributions during Hacktoberfest:

Being a person who is not an expert at programming as of now, I will be participating in Hacktoberfest by doing low-code and non-code contributions this year.

These contributions include:

  • Helping with the documentation (i.e ReadMe files, Official documentation, Contributing Guidelines docs and many more.)
  • Write blogs/articles for repos and companies looking out for them
  • Working on basic code (i.e: HTML/CSS or any other language really)

Finding Repositories to Contribute:

Now that we know how to contribute and what to contribute, we are left with where to contribute!

For your PRs to be accepted and be eligible for swags, see that you contribute to issues having a hacktoberfest label or check for the repositories and companies participating in the event. Your PRs will be accepted on the Hacktoberfest platform only if you have relevant labels to hacktoberfest on your PR.

A great way to find relevant repositories is simply doing a Search on GitHub and going through the results or clicking on the Topic for more relevant repositories!

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Alternatively: Here is the link you can follow to see the topic of Hacktoberfest on GitHub.

But, I have a better repository for you to find the best projects to contribute to: Pradumna's blog post on finding the project during Hacktoberfest helped me to find the best ones for me and I assure you it can help you find one too!

More Resources for the Hacktoberfest:

  1. Percona is accepting code, non-code and low code contributions this time! Visit them to learn more!
  2. OpenGenus is accepting low-code, non-code as well as code contributions as well.
  3. Accessible for All by my friend Emma Dawson has repositories with issues that are beginner friendly, do check these out.
  4. Get to know about How You can be prepared by watching this small video by Praveen
  5. Join Communities like CommClassroom, EddieHub, CodeIn Community or 4C or any community to level up your OpenSource game!

Things to be noted while contributing:

While Hacktoberfest comes with a lot of swags for you to get, it is about letting more people know about Open Source! And as I did say in my last tweet:

Learning and growing is important!


That's a wrap! I hope you had fun reading the blog and I hope I helped you a little bit in your journey towards OpenSource.

About the Blogger:

I am Krupali or Chai! I am a Computer Science student who loves talking about OpenSource and Content. I have recently started footing into web development and I log my journey on this blog as well. With that, I love reading and talking about everything so you can hit me up for a quick chat!

For any questions you have, you can reach out to me through LinkedIn || Twitter or leave a comment below!

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