Lee Reilly
Senior Program Manager, GitHub Developer Relations. Open source hype man, AI whisperer, hackathon and game jam wrangler. I write && manage programs, support dev communities, and occasionally ship something.
Celebrate open source this October by participating in the fourth annual Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source software in partnership with DigitalOcean. Last year, contributors from 114 countries submitted…
Celebrate open source this October by participating in the fourth annual Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source software in partnership with DigitalOcean.
Last year, contributors from 114 countries submitted over 90,000 pull requests to all kinds of projects—everything from documentation tweaks and bug fixes to new features and performance improvements.
Some incredibly welcoming communities and projects like Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, saw over five hundred contributions throughout the month. Some first time-contributors continued on projects and have gone on to become regular contributors and maintainers.
Whether it’s your first or four-hundredth contribution, we think everyone can get something out of Hacktoberfest—the thrill of committing to open source or the rush that comes with your first merged pull request, for example.
If that’s not enough, consider the free limited-edition t-shirt you’ll receive when you make four valid pull requests! Please visit the Hacktoberfest website for full details.

Connect with other participants, show the world your contributions, or just show off your new shirt with the #hacktoberfest hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. We love hearing about your first open source contributions

Don’t know where to start? If you’ve got the skills and a little free time this October, there’s an open source project that could use your help.
To participate, simply open a pull request and contribute to any open source project during the month of October. Fix a bug, add a feature, or even improve some documentation. You can find projects that need your help by searching the hacktoberfest label and filtering for your programming language of choice.
Learn more from the Hacktoberfest website
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Calling on developers, startups, and open source organizations to advocate against patent rules that would make it harder to challenge bad patents by the December 2 deadline.
In October, we experienced four incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.