Hacktoberfest

Well you must have heard the term ‘Hacktoberfest’ but do you know what it is. In this blog, I will be sharing all the necessary details about it.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration in October which focuses on open-source involvement. During this event, several organizations welcome contributions in their projects stored in GitHub and GitLab, inviting developers to collaborate and make meaningful improvements.

You can call it a celebration to welcome first time contributors and projects from various domains are registered as contributions accepted is both code and no-code. Code contributions includes HTML/CSS to Python while no-code contributions is accepted to improve documentations.

How to contribute?

To contribute, first visit GitHub and search for Hacktoberfest and there will be 130k+ repository results. Each repository has tags for which it mentions the language used, the contribution level, domains and Hacktoberfest. Click on the repositories and visit the issue tab. Scroll and see the issues that are Open and has the Hacktoberfest tag.

There are many more tags with each having a different meaning. For example, check this out! Read the issue thoroughly, the README.md file from the code tab to understand what the project is about and once you have a clear idea of what you have to work on, express your interest to contribute in it by asking the admin[project owner] to assign it to you. Once assigned, you can start working.

To work on the code, go through the CONTRIBUTING.md file which shares how to clone the repo, work on it, upload changes and create a pull request. Once you have completed these steps, then you have to be patient to get the PR merged. Once merged, it is reflected in your Hacktoberfest profile and is sent for review.

Many a times, there are templates for creating issues and pull requests. Do not get confused by that, just fill out the details required and for the pull request if there is no such template, do mention what improvements you have made in your code using a checklist.

Where not to contribute?

Hacktoberfest has a new rule from this year, the users doing 2 or more spammy contributions will be banned from further contribution indefinitely. So one should be aware of where not to contribute.

There are a lot of spammy repositories which has the Hacktoberfest tag and it tells to solve Data Structure questions in different languages. While I have no issues with that, one should understand that that is not quality contribution and no one benefits from that. Visit the following repositories to get an idea of what the structure might be for such spammy ones.

For example: https://github.com/keshavsingh4522/hacktoberfest, https://github.com/ossamamehmood/Hacktoberfest, https://github.com/tarunsinghofficial/HacktoberFest, https://github.com/shivaylamba/Hacktoberfest and the list goes on.

Check the repositories which has the last commit date more than 2 years which means it is not accepting PRs actively and working on it is waste of time. Also, repositories with the tag of public archive doesn’t accept PRs. Repositories which tell to add your name and GitHub profile is also not worthy of contribution.

Review period

There is a review period where the Hacktoberfest team reviews the quality of pull request and there is a 7 day period for that. There are tags beside the PR like Accepted[your PR is accepted], Waiting[your PR is under review], Spam[your PR is spammy], Excluded[repo in which the PR got merged doesn’t follow rules of Hacktoberfest thus that contribution is excluded from the official count of 4 merged PR], Out of bounds[PR merged is before 1st October or after 31st October], etc.

Rewards

Till 2022, there used to be physical swag like t-shirt and stickers but since 2023 it has become digital i.e., the Holopin Badges.

Benefit of contribution

Folks have one very common question that “how does this contributions benefit me”. I have answer for that as well. You build a portfolio on contributing to open source projects, you can add it in your resume and LinkedIn profile. The most unexpected might be a job opportunity and there are times when these contributions can make your application stronger and better than others with you having a high acceptance probability.

Conclusion

To get a more detailed understanding of Hacktoberfest, check out the webinar I hosted on YouTube. The contribution period has started from 1st October so register yourself and let’s contribute to some projects and improve it for future users!