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Hacktoberfest

The Hacktoberfest is hosted by DigitalOcean, and its main purpose is to encourage participation in the open-source community by giving people a platform to participate in events, helping them make their first pull request and give them an opportunity to make more exciting pull requests and to help out in open source projects.

Who is it for?

Anyone from any part of the world can participate in the Hacktober fest, as every year, participants come from all over the world and represent thousands of unique skill sets. As you might have already guessed, this program welcomes everyone who is already a part of the open-source software community and beginners as well.

How long is the program for?

The program starts on October 1st and ends on October 31st. Even though you will be working for one month, your participation will have a lasting effect on people and technology long after October.

Why should you contribute?

In hacktober fest, there are mainly two kinds of contributors: 1. Participant 2. Maintainers

Participants

  • Even if you are an expert or a beginner, there will always be new or unique projects which are beginner-friendly as well as something which can make you rack your brain. As we know, every year new technologies are coming up this will be your perfect chance to get your hands dirty on them.

  • Even if you are not interested in learning new technologies, open-source projects already have a huge amount of libraries and frameworks for you to work upon. By contributing to them, you will take your time to check how it works and how you use it and for a beginner, it helps you get accustomed to git and PR's (Pull Requests).

This is the perfect opportunity to work on tech stacks such as MERN, LAMP stack, etc. It can also help you get over your fears regarding git, and you might build up great connections that you never might be handy in the future.

Maintainer

  • As you are a maintainer, you might be thinking that " is there any use for me to do this it is not like I am contributing." That's the wrong notion which you have; by being a repository maintainer, you have a lot of advantages.

  • Firstly, if you are someone who wants to make a great project being a maintainer will help you in getting new developers who want to contribute to your repository, and if they have a great experience, they might visit your future repo's. You might find talented developers among them who might be helpful to you in the future.

  • At the end of the day, by allowing contributors to contribute to your repository, you are still contributing to the open-source community.

Companies

  • Many companies can utilize this opportunity to find good developers for their company, and they can contribute to the company's repositories as well.

  • If you are someone who wants to create a start-up, it might be a great opportunity to get to know some great developers as well and some newbies who might one day be interested in joining your company.

Some cool facts about October Fest

I am sure you might be thinking why every year over 100k people to contribute to hacktober fest, and its not just because of the advantages I told you above. If you successfully contribute 4 PR's you will win free swags such as a T-shirt which is something that even a beginner can get. The swags have encouraged a lot of beginners to contribute to open source, but it's not the main thing you should be looking forward to as what you learn,the connections you make, and the contributions you make will be with you and the community forever.

If you want to participate in hacktober fest don't forget to check here