Its October again and that means its time to hack for swag as far as open-source enthusiasts are concerned. Hacktoberfest is back and this year it’s celebrating its fifth year !!

What’s Hacktoberfest? 🤔

For those new to Hacktoberfest, it is a month-long festival of support and contributions to open-source. How it works is you need to signup, then make at least five pull requests to any public Github project in October. If you complete this as one of the first 50,000 people to do so, you will receive a special Hacktoberfest T-Shirt.

Why participate?

Everyone is welcome!

Participants can range from battle-hardened professionals to absolute noobs who wanna get their leg in the door. Passion for open source is the only requirement :)

Personal Growth

Participating in Hacktoberfest leads to personal growth, professional opportunities, and opportunities for community building. All that starts with meaningful contributions to open-source software.

Impact on the open-source community

In the open-source software community, we are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Your contribution has a long-lasting effect on people and technology long after the month of hacking is over and the swag is distributed.

Free Swag! ;)

If these benefits still don’t sound sweet to you, hacktoberfest provides a free t-shirt with other swag for completing the challenge. The challenge is damn simple and you’ll be left with a sense of personal satisfaction above and beyond these benefits.

How do I begin?

Let’s get you prepped up on your way to clearing hacktoberfest successfully.

Step 1: Register for Hacktoberfest You need a GitHub account. Also, take a look at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Register your GitHub account with hacktoberfest site.

Step 2: Select a repository to contribute to Lots of organizations announce that they are part of Hacktoberfest and make it easy for contributors by tagging their GitHub issues as “hacktoberfest”. You could also look for the “good first issue” or “help wanted” labels to get started.

Your contributions can be anything from code to documentation. So pick one repository and try to create a pull request. Creating pull requests is how you contribute to repositories on GitHub. Generally, every major repo will have a maintainer assigned. Only the maintainers and people with push access can accept your PRs.

GitHub is a major platform to host open-source projects. So there’s a high chance you’ll find something you can contribute to. Git is the tool that will help you push your work to GitHub. If you don’t know the basics of Git, follow this tutorial here.

If you’re still not sure about what to contribute, take a look a the repo’s issues section. Go through this section and try to pick ones you find are easy or doable.

NOTE: Most major Open Source repositories have contribution guidelines which should be strictly followed. So go through the guidelines before you start hacking!

Step 3: 4 more PRs You are free to make PRs in any repository of your choice. Complete those PRs and your job is done. Check your stats on the hacktoberfest site. Once your 5 PRs are complete, be sure to provide your shipping address on the hacktoberfest site.

Step 4: Wait for swag to arrive!

Happy Hacking !!