Kara Sowles
DevRel @ GitHub. Showing open source projects the love!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/feynudibranch
Giving back to open source projects is a great way to practice skills you don’t get to use in your day job. Check out ways to get involved!
It’s that time of year again! Whether your October is full of pumpkins or spring breezes (hello, Southern Hemisphere!), it’s sure to be Hacktoberfest season. Hacktoberfest is a yearly event to encourage people to contribute to open source in October. It’s a celebration of community, learning and giving back—topped off by DigitalOcean thanking participants. You can read more about the festivities—and the thank yous—on the official site.
In the past year, we’ve seen over 2.2 billion contributions to projects on GitHub from more than 65 million developers. Giving back to open source projects by contributing can be a great way to learn, practice skills you don’t currently get to use in your day job, and meet new people by working together on projects that you enjoy using.
To start, register as part of Hacktoberfest 2021 here: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/register
Hacktoberfest can be an especially welcoming time to dip your toes into open source contributions for the first time. There’s plenty of streams, posts, guides, and conversations around getting started. You’re joining many folks also starting their journey this month!
Hacktoberfest can be great for finishing off a project, or starting something fresh.
There’s a new way to contribute this year—financially. Hacktoberfest is the perfect time to give back to open source maintainers. Maintainers are the backbones of the software we all use. We all know backbones get sore after a long day, so consider sending them some support (and a lumbar pillow). The Hacktoberfest donation page is integrated with both GitHub Sponsors and OpenCollective to make it easy to find projects you’d like to thank. While you’re there, consider what smaller projects you benefit from and could especially use relative to resources.
No need to go anything alone! There are currently 85 public virtual Hacktoberfest events listed, and more coming.
Maintainers are the keystone of open source. This year’s Hacktoberfest has a new, added focus: empowering open source maintainers.
Welcome to Hacktoberfest! Whenever you choose to do it, we want to thank you for your contributions to open source. Whether it be documentation, coding, supporting others, running projects, donating, running an event, tuning into a stream, or squashing bugs, Hacktoberfest is a pleasant reminder of what we do on GitHub all year long.
Register now, and we’ll see you in the repositories. 👋
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