Introduction

The month of Hacktoberfesft is coming to a close, and it's time to unveil the remarkable insights we've gathered. At Vaunt, we've been on a mission to support open-source communities, incentivize developers, and recognize their valuable contributions. Let's dive into the data we've collected from this fantastic open-source celebration.

Hacktoberfest and Vaunt

For the uninitiated, Hacktoberfest is an annual event that encourages open-source contributions, organized by DigitalOcean. This year, Vaunt joined in to celebrate the contributions of developers to the open-source community.

Collecting Valuable Data

Vaunt leveraged an archive of GitHub data to gain insights into Hacktoberfest. You can find more information about this archive at GH Archive, including how the archive has been made available through a public BigQuery dataset. Additionally, we've developed our own GitHub app to streamline data collection. The app captures information about pull requests, issues, commits, reviews, stars, and discussions.

The archive dataset in BigQuery can be used to find events directly related to Hacktoberfest by checking for events with the type “PullRequestEvent” and parsing valuable information from the payload. For example, you can check the base repository topics for “hacktoberfest” as well as look for labels including “hacktoberfest” or “hacktoberfest_accepted” and get additional information such as the created_at time of the PR and whether it was closed.

Here is a snippet of one of the queries we used when checking for authors of multiple pull requests in repositories with the Hacktoberfest topic or label:

SELECT JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(payload, '$.pull_request.user.login') FROM githubarchive.day.20231001
  WHERE (type="PullRequestEvent" and (JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$.pull_request.base.repo.topics') like '%"hacktoberfest"%'
  OR JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$.pull_request.labels') like '%"hacktoberfest"%'
  OR JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$.pull_request.labels') like '%"hacktoberfest_accepted"%')
  AND JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(payload, '$.pull_request.state')='closed'
  AND JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(payload, '$.pull_request.created_at') > '2023-01-01T00:00:00Z'
  AND JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$.pull_request.labels') not like '%"spam"%'
  AND JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$.pull_request.labels') not like '%"invalid"%')
  GROUP BY 1 HAVING COUNT(distinct repo.name) >= 2 AND COUNT(*) >= 4 limit 10;

The GitHub Impact

GitHub has been at the heart of Hacktoberfest. As of our last check, there were over 139,000 repositories with the Hacktoberfest topic. These repositories have participated in the event over the past ten years and have retained the topic. This demonstrates the long-lasting impact of this open-source celebration.

Active Stats

This year, we've collected data from 42,000 unique repositories that had pull requests, issues, or reviews labeled with Hacktoberfest. The data also includes 63,000 users who've contributed in various ways, and 5,481 unique organizations participating.

User Engagement: The numbers speak volumes. The engagement in GitHub repositories with Hacktoberfest activity was substantial. It reflects the enthusiasm of developers in the open-source community.

A Month of High Activity

The activity in GitHub repositories marked with the Hacktoberfest topic saw spikes during the early days of October. These surges demonstrate how developers eagerly joined the event. The activity dipped slightly over weekends, as expected, but it remained relatively high throughout the month.

A Surge in Open Issues

While Hacktoberfest didn't specifically track issues for awards, maintainers actively opened issues with the Hacktoberfest label to encourage contributions. This led to a surge of opened issues in the early days of the event, and many were subsequently closed, showing a significant level of developer engagement.

A Glimpse of GitHub Archive Data

Our analysis of GitHub archive data for two months, September and October, reveals an impressive story. The number of users who made contributions doubled during October, coinciding with Hacktoberfest. Repositories that received contributions also doubled in number. This data demonstrates the undeniable impact of Hacktoberfest on open-source contributions.

Custom Achievements and More

With the data collected, Vaunt created a set of custom achievements to recognize participating users. Some of these achievements are similar to the Hacktoberfest criteria and a few are custom-made ones to make the event even more special.

Our first achievement, Stellar Starter, was awarded to any user who contributed to a GitHub repository with the Hacktoberfest topic during October 2023. This includes creating, reviewing, or commenting on pull requests or issues. This achievement was meant to be more open to allow as many users as possible who are contributing to Hacktoberfest to qualify. So far 61,180 users have been identified that earned this achievement.

The second achievement is called Cosmic Coder. This is awarded to users who created and merged 2 or more qualifying pull requests to a Hacktoberfest repository during October 2023. This one is meant to be a little more challenging to earn than the starter and is similar to the Hacktoberfest award, however, only requires 2 pull requests instead of 4. So far 31,478 unique users have qualified for this achievement.

The third achievement is called Interstellar Voyager. This one is awarded to users who created and merged 4 pull requests to multiple repositories with the Hacktoberfest topic during October 2023. One additional stipulation of this achievement is that the users must be contributing to more than one repository, which is slightly different from the Hacktoberfest award. So far 11,818 users have qualified for this achievement.

From the GH Archive data that we processed, we found that a majority of users who participate in Hacktoberfest only contribute to a single repository. So we thought it would be nice to reward users who make significant contributions to more than one repository during the event.

Our last achievement is called Galactic Hacker. This one is awarded to users who create and merge 4 pull requests to multiple repositories and close 4 issues that were created during October 2023. These criteria were chosen to be significantly more difficult to achieve to recognize users who go above and beyond to contribute to open-source repositories. So far this achievement has been awarded to 471 users.

Install Vaunt

All of these achievements are specifically granted through Vaunt, which can be installed for free for users from the GitHub Marketplace. If you contributed during Hacktoberfest and would like to show off your achievements on your own personal GitHub README, then just install Vaunt and follow our guide to set up your profile here.

Once you have Vaunt installed you can add the following code to your README.md on your profile to show your Achievement badges by just replacing {github_username} with your username:

<p>
  <img src="https://api.vaunt.dev/v1/github/entities/{github_username}/achievements?format=svg&limit=3" width="350" />
</p>

Contributions from October are still being processed and reviewed so allow some time for the achievements to be added.

Conclusion

The data we've gathered paints a clear picture of the incredible impact of Hacktoberfest. It showcases the unwavering dedication of the open-source community and the power of collaborative development. As Hacktoberfest draws to a close, Vaunt celebrates the countless developers who've dedicated their time and expertise to enriching the world of open source.

With this incredible data in hand, we're excited to continue our mission of supporting open-source communities and rewarding developers for their contributions. Let's make open source even better, together!

Sign up for Vaunt today and start showcasing your developer contributions!

To stay in the loop on future developments follow us on Twitter or join our Discord! Don't hesitate to make feature requests.