Developers Assemble! We are less than forty-eight hours away from Hacktoberfest 2020. I will join the fest for the fourth consecutive time in what is now known as the second year of lockdown for the semi plague. It might sound crazy but I have not done any open-source contribution since last year’s edition. However, I did pass both AZ-900 and AZ-204 Azure certifications so that’s way better.
What is Hacktoberfest? The principle is simple. You have 31 days throughout October to submit five pull requests in order to gain a t-shirt and bragging rights as a proud open-source contributor. Basically, you get some IRL evidence of your open-source contributions outside of using a Patreon or that daily pumpkin spice latte from all your Github Sponsors. Also, it can be a good distraction that will give you a break from the insane news cycle. And yes, some bits are pasted from last year’s post because little has changed since, unfortunately.
How do you join though? Last year I foolishly stated that you need to know how to code. However, it is not entirely the case. Kotaku writers rejoice that you can also write documentation and fix typos.
However, if you do want to contribute further and write some code, there are a wealth of free tutorials you can grab on OpenClassrooms (a little website that helped me a lot when I started learning dev during my IT school years which I will always remember as that little french website named lesiteduzer0). If you’re ready to shed a few quids, you can find some classes on Udemy as well. You’ve got a few hours left to learn. Good luck!
Know how to code? Check. Now what? Next, you need a Github account and when the time comes, link it to the contest. Then in terms of actually contributing, Github has a comprehensive guide on contributing to open-source in general which is a great place to start. Once you went through it, you can find hacktoberfest issues you can filter them with the tag “hacktoberfest”.
Where to find more issues? There is a couple of places to find accessible issues that anyone can solve. The first is the bug-hunting/fixing platform Huntr which I wrote about before and the second is the Up for Grabs website. There are definitely more places so don’t hesitate to share them with me.
Want more info on the contest? You can check out my 2018, 2019 and 2020 posts about Hacktoberfest. If you need even more details, go on DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest website. In the meantime, I’m just gonna wait here until I can open a few PRs to add a new free t-shirt to my collection.
