Hacktoberfest has started back up again for its sixth year running, sponsored by DigitalOcean and DEV. The annual event brings together open source communities from all over the world for virtual and local collaboration. Organizers are expecting approximately 150,000 participants this year.
The first 50,000 participants who make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted repositories between October 1-31, will receive a commemorative Hacktoberfest T-shirt. Organizers have introduced a one-week review period for PRs this year in order to give maintainers the opportunity to flag any spammy PRs as invalid. The goal is to encourage participants to submit more thoughtful contributions.
More than 21,000 issues on GitHub have already been labeled for Hacktoberfest. Maintainers who want to have their projects included should identify issues best suited to new contributors and apply the “Hacktoberfest” label. Organizers also recommend creating a CONTRIBUTING.md file with contribution guidelines and adopting a code of conduct for the project.
Adding WordPress to a search for Hacktoberfest issues displays 120 issues that are related in some way to themes, plugins, apps, and other products with WordPress-specific needs. The event is a good opportunity for maintainers to get more exposure for their projects and help new contributors gain confidence through a structured contribution process.
This year Hacktoberfest’s organizers are also featuring projects focused on combating climate change. These include repos for open source technologies, such as an embeddable map that shows climate change projections, an app targeting consumption habits, and greenhouse gas emissions data packaged for exploration and charting, to name a few.
Hacktoberfest is open to contributors at any level of experience. For those just getting started, DigitalOcean has created an Introduction to Open Source series that covers the basics of git and how to create a pull request. DEV also has a Git crash course available to get new contributors up to speed.
