Hactoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software that happens in the month of October, with support from DigitalOcean and a few more partner companies. During this event, open-source software enthusiasts, beginners, and the developer communities come together to contribute to open-source projects.

What is open-source software

Open-source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible i.e. anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit. Open-source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open-source software is often free and more flexible because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company . How is Open source software benefiting us? Just imagine a life where you need to buy software like Mozilla Firefox, VLC media player, or Java in order to use them... How pathetic that would be! Thanks to Open-source software to make this world a better place.

The most famous example of Open Source software is Linux, it is a free, open-source operating system, released under the GNU General Public License. Because Linux is released under an open-source license, anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code, as long as they do so under the same license.

Now, you may ask if they're free how do the organizations earn money... So they have some additional ways of income like providing paid support, charging money for additional features, functionalities, or updates, and many more ways. For example, if you try to download an IDE by JetBrains like PyCharm you can find two options, one is a community version that is free and another is professional for which we need to pay.

If you want to know more about Open Source leave a comment and I'll definitely make an article about it.

How can I contribute?

You can contribute to Open-Source in a number of ways. Some of them can be:

• Prepare and share your project for collaboration
• Contribute to the betterment of a project via pull requests
• Organize an event
• Mentor others
• Donate directly to open source projects

If you are new to tech like me and thinking if you can do this or not... Don't think, just do it! Beginners have a special position in Hacktoberfest, many organizations, and communities come forward to encourage beginners to contribute to open-source. Remember that every contribution matters and in fact Hactoberfest is primarily meant to support people to start contributing to Open-Source, you don't need to build a complex feature at the beginning itself;

• You can improve the documentation
• You can add examples to show how the code works
• You can write tutorials for the project
• You can add a translation for a project
• You can fix typos and arrange the project's work folder correctly

Tip: When you are not sure of what contributions to make as a beginner in a repository, go to the "issue" page and look for the issues with the "Good first issue" tag.

Prerequisites?

You need to have an account in GitHub or GitLab to register in Hactoberfest

To start contributing you need to know how Git works and how to use GitHub or GitLab. There are a number of articles and tutorials on the internet that you can refer to. You can look at articles I have written on What is Git and How to use GitBash but they're not enough, I recommend learning more and keep applying whatever you learn.

Every Open-Source organization is different, they have their own rules and expectations for contributing, make sure you try to read over them and contribute accordingly.

How to find projects for Hactoberfest?

There are two roles in this, one is the maintainers i.e; the people who review and take care of the pull requests in the project as part of their organization or personal, and the other is the participants i.e; people who contribute to the project.

Maintainers determine the projects which involve in Hacktoberfest by adding the "Hacktoberfest" topic. Quality pull requests submitted to those projects on GitHub and GitLab are rewarded and Engaged maintenance of Hacktoberfest tagged repositories are rewarded (maintainers will be rewarded)

If you don't find any known projects with the "hacktoberfest" topic, go to the search bar in GitHub/GitLab and search for 'hactoberfest' then a number of repositories taking part in hacktoberfest will appear.

You can sort them based on language, number of stars, activeness, etc. If you have any open-source project on your GitHub and you want others to make your code better then, even you can apply for a maintainer role and do your work as a maintainer. But don't do that if you're a beginner or you don't have a proper cause for the project.

Rules

1. Pull requests can be made in any participating GitHub or GitLab hosted repository/projects. Look for the 'hacktoberfest' topic to know if a project is participating in Hacktoberfest.

2. You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31. Just be sure to sign up on the official Hacktoberfest website for your pull requests to count.

3. Do not spam!

Okay, the 3rd rule isn't there on the official site but I felt like keeping it the reason is in the below image

This is such a good initiative by DigitalOcean and other partnered companies to encourage open-source contributions, so why not use this opportunity to explore the world of open-source rather than making spammy pull requests. Although if the PRs are marked as invalid or spam they won't be taken into count and there is a chance of being disqualified!

Details

• The pull request must contain commits you made yourself.

• If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam, it will not be counted toward your participation in Hacktoberfest.

• If a maintainer reports behavior that’s not in line with the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate.

• A pull request is considered approved once it has an overall approving review from maintainers, or has been merged by maintainers, or has been given the 'hacktoberfest-accepted' label.

If you want to know more you can look at the Hactoberfest Resources page.

Rewards

Anybody who has registered for the Hactoberfest event in October and got at least 4 PRs successfully merged within the timeline is eligible to get exclusive swags from the event organizers!

The swags include a limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt or plant a tree (we have to choose anyone) and a digital badge and stickers from DEV community.

Tee or Tree

In the rewards, you can either choose a t-shirt or Plant a tree on behalf of you by tree-nation foundation which aims to make this globe carbon neutral. And how cool is it to plant a tree with your name somewhere far from you and it grows bigger and bigger giving us air to breathe...

I choose tree over a tee! What will you choose?

I hope this added some value to you and I wish you all the best for your participation in the upcoming Hacktoberfest! Maybe that could open a lot of doors for your future.

Thank You