Hacktoberfest is returning to celebrate its 9th year. If you are tech-savvy, you are probably well aware of the term “Hacktoberfest”. If not, let me explain. Hacktoberfest is an open-source event that encourages beginners or experienced developers to contribute to existing or new projects. It is celebrated in the month of October every year.
Seems interesting!!
If you want to be a part of the event, you can participate by registering between 26 September to 31 October and search a revelvent project that matches your skills labeled with the “hacktoberfest” label.
If you are a Low-code or Non-code contributor, do not worry, as this event is not only about coding. So, read through the full blog to get detailed insights into this event.
Introduction
Open source projects are the resources that are ruling the tech world with their high-quality code and free availability. It also means that the user-to-contribute ratio is a bit low. Few contributors work in improving or maintaining the available open source projects compared to the million users. Thus, Hacktoberfest encourages you to contribute to your favorite projects, and you will get a gift as a reward.
In the digital world, numerous programmers depend on open-source libraries to complete existing or new projects. It has been observed that around 2.6 billion contributions have been made to open-source libraries in the past year. Hacktoberfest is an ideal way to give back and contribute to the projects we all depend upon.
When we discussed code contribution, the first thing that came to our mind was open-source projects. You can Explore open source libraries including various other topics on these open source platforms. However, non-code contributors such as advocacy, writing, financial, and design contributions are greatly needed these days. It is advised to write some blogs and articles, design graphics or logos, or schedule tweets to support and encourage the open-source community. In fact, you need not be a technical expert to make a difference.
Why Hacktoberfest?
DigitalOcean is trying to build awareness in the world of open-source projects with Hacktoberfest. It aims to encourage users or programmers to explore the benefits of being an open-source developer. By contributing, you will realize the importance of the programmers who provide you code for free by investing effort, mental energy, and, most critically, time. So, here in this fest, DigitalOcean wants to motivate users to support the open-source projects most suitable for you.
You might think, “What will you get out of this?”
Let me answer this query with basically this event that makes you contribute to the open-source libraries you feel are most helpful to you and others. Making contributions ensures that the project gets bug-free and new features might be added. However, here are few incentives you will get:-
- Increasing your creativity.
- Experience the back side of open-source project development.
- Hacktoberfest T-Shirt.
Everyone is talking about the benefits mentioned above, but there are many associated benefits with this event as well. When you contribute to an open-source project, it will improve and enhance your portfolio and give your future employer detailed insights into your work. Contribution to the open source community will also positively impact your employer. Contribution to open-source projects will also assist you in understanding the maintenance of such libraries. You will also gain the knowledge of how the community interacts with each other.
How can a beginner participate in Hacktoberfest?
Beginners can contribute to the documentation for some projects, but they have to make some extra efforts. There are some easy and complicated projects lists available, so you can choose your projects as per your skills and expertise.
Some steps you must have to follow to make contribute are:-
Step I: Register between 26 September 26 to 31 October
Step II: Make Pull requests in any GITLAB or GitHub-hosted project that is participating in this fest
Step III: Your request must be merged or pulled by the project maintainers to count your total. You can contribute to the 5 repositories or any other repositories as per your choice.
Step IV: You must have four merged or pulled requests between 1 October to 31 october. Check the progress on the official website.
Best GitHub Repositories to Contribute
In HACKTOBERFEST, you can contribute to various projects in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Next.js, React, Node.js and other languages. The open source is not limited to the code contribution; each project mentioned above welcomes no-code or low-code contributions. Some of the libraries you can contribute are mentioned below:-
ReactPlay
It is an open-source platform that assists you in learning the ReactJS language faster with hand on practice samples. It is a group of projects that could be used to learn ReactJS. Apart from the primary platform, you could contribute to various projects such as blogs, activities and docs.
Contribution Areas:
- Elements and Bug Fixes
- Writing End-to-End tests
- Creating Plays
- Writing Blog articles
- Assistance in Community Building
- Documentation
TryShape
It is an open-source platform to develop shapes according to the user’s choice using a simple, easy-to-use interface. You can make circles, polygons, shapes, banners etc., on this platform and can export or save them as CSS, SVG and PNG.
Contribution Areas
- Writing Blog articles
- Documentation
- Features
- Bug Fixes
Web APIS Playground
Web APIs playground showcases the javascript web Application programming interface with demonstration and examples.
Contribution Areas:
- Features
- Bug Fixes
- Blog articles writing
- Documentation
- Adding new Web APIs
Shoes
It is an online e-commerce shoe site developed by Strapi and Gatsby. The open source project was made to understand the functioning of Strapi and Gatsby to develop a static e-commerce website.
Contribution Areas:
- Adding new feature implementation
- Fix bugs.
- Deploy the site publicly
- Write Content
Conclusion
So, our primary goal was to assist you with the technologies you desire to learn. The initial few pull requests might make you a little bit nervous about the changes you sent. As the project maintainer or owner gets free, they will look at your pull request, and if they find the request suitable, the pull request will merge. If due, for any reason, your pull request does not get merged, do not panic and ask the concerned person for feedback.
Even after going through the details, we are sure you still have some doubts; in such cases, you can get started with kandi by Open Weaver. kandi is an open-source platform that provides codes and libraries to reuse in your projects. Kandi encourages you to participate in the Hacktoberfest to show and increase your skills. Kandi also assists you in determining the topic and provides reusable codes, useful code snippets, libraries and kits to build the solutions to contribute to Hacktoberfest.So what are you waiting for, get started now.