Get Ready For Hacktoberfest — Contribute to Open Source, Get a Free Shirt!
Hacktoberfest — The month long Open Source contribution event.
What is Hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest is the easiest way to get into open source! Hacktoberfest is a month long festival of code presented by Digital Ocean and GitHub.
During the entire month of October, all you have to do is open a pull request and contribute to any open source project. Yes, any project. It can be a be a bug fix, improvement, or even a documentation change!
If you’ve never contributed to open source before, this is the perfect time to get started because Hacktoberfest provides a large list of available contribution opportunities (and yes, there are always plenty for beginners too).
Free Shirt?
Details haven’t been released for this year yet, but last year, anyone who made five pull requests in the month of October got a free shirt from Digital Ocean! There were 15,000 free shirts given away! (see the picture above for what it looked like!)
Other companies usually jump on board and offer additional swag as well! This year an accepted pull request at SendGrid will get you t-shirt, sticker, and pen.
New to Open Source?
We’re just seven days away from the festivities commencing! If you’re brand new to open source and GitHub, I strongly recommend you check out this article: A Step by Step Guide to Making Your First GitHub Contribution. This is a great way to learn about contributing to GitHub!
Want more details?
I’ll be providing more details closer to October 1st when Hacktoberfest begins. Plus, throughout the month of October, I’ll also be sending out the best free swag opportunities as I come across them. To stay up to date, you can join my once-weekly email list here, and follow me on Twitter.
