Ever wondered how to get into Open source ? How to make some contributions to the repositories ? Well, wait no more, the season of open source is here.
What is Hacktoberfest ?
Hacktoberfest is a month long open source contribution time which celebrates the love for open source. Developers from all over the world plunge into month long madness to make changes around the millions of repositories hosted on GitHub.
Hacktoberfest was started 5 years ago by GitHub to urge the developers around the world to start contributing to the open source software. Now, this has become a festival where everyone, from noob to pro, contribute to make small changes that eventually take big shape.
How can I start with Hacktoberfest ?
First of all, make a GitHub account. Even if you don’t know to code, there are many possible ways one can contribute. Correcting typos, documenting plugins and software, contributing to knowledge repositories, etc. are some of the ways.
What do I get from all this ?
Immense satisfaction ! When you make your first Pull Request and it’s merged, it does feel awesome. Apart from that…what every developer loves….SWAG ! You’ll get free swag ( T-shirts and stickers ) from GitHub if you open 5 Pull Requests this year ( Even if they are not merged 😉 ).
Apart from that this year many individual organizations are giving away their own customized T-shirts if you make PR to their repositories. Some of the big names in this league are Microsoft, Auth0, etc. to name a few.
How hacktoberfest 2017 started my journey into Open Source ?
I started contributing to OS last year. I started with knowledge repositories as these are the easiest way to get started. Unknowing, I made some PRs in october during the hacktoberfest. Then, one day, while going through medium article, I go to know about Hacktoberfest. I signed up to know I have already done the needful.
Later during the same month, I became a collaborator and maintainer for the AlgoWiki Organization. Of course, I got that cool hacktoberfest T-shirt too !
Where to contribute this year ?
Contribute to any publicly hosted repository on GitHub. Check out the issues labelled with good first issue and hacktoberfest. These are the easiest issues to get started and make those minimum number of pull requests. Some of the easiest repositories to contribute are knowledge repositories.
Check out AlgoWiki, Freecodecamp, Awesome - something (now, generalize something to any language you can think of - python, java, R, etc.). These are very good starting point to contribute to OSS.
What’s new this year for me ?
Last year, I just participated as participant. This year, I have launched an open source project that I started working on sometime back.
Pypackages is an open tutorial themed repository for python packages. Why python, cause I just love python ❤️! There are many packages available in python to do different kind of things. From image processing to text handling and what not ! Don’t yet forget the inbuilt packages. All this makes python a supercharged language to handle whatever you throw at it. But, whenever one has any problem and starts to go on searching the web, there are a lot of sources to go through, even for trivial problems. Leave aside the documentation and blog. Even to learn any new module, going through all these things becomes tiresome, Hence, I thought of making a quick guide to python packages. This would help in quick review for interviews and would eventualy grow as I learn more and more.
Today, in the afternoon, I opened quite a number of issues to which many people can contribute to. Check them out. All you need to know is python and you can learn about a new module as you contribute to pypackages.
I must say the start to Hacktoberfest 2018 has been awesome. Just as I opened up the issues, open source enthusiasts begin pouring in to solve this issue. Already 4 - 5 people have started to contribute and as I write this blog, two PRs have already been merged. Kudos to all the contributors for their hard work!
I will be opening some more issues in AlgoWiki as well as Pypackages during the entire month. Fork, contribute and push a PR to take a dip in the holy sea of open source.
So, what are you waiting for? Contribute and flaunt all your swag from this year’s Hacktoberfest. Go and make those PRs count !!!