Hacktoberfest 2019 — Get Free Swag by Contributing to Open Source!
October 03, 2019
It’s that time of year again! The 6th edition of Hacktoberfest is already live!
It’s time to get rewarded for contributing to the open source community.
Did you know that there are multiple tech companies that participate in Hacktoberfest and give away sweet, sweet swag?
What is Hacktoberfest?
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source software. It was started at DigitalOcean as a way to foster a sense of community and encourage more participation in open source projects.
To reward Hacktoberfest contributors, DigitalOcean has designed a limited edition T-shirt for those who complete the challenge each year. This year, the first 50,000 participants will be eligible to receive the limited edition shirt.
Why should I join?
You can help drive the growth of open source and make positive contributions to a community that is growing exponentially every year!
You will learn things like doing code reviews of your pull requests, and you will meet and get to know new people working on many OSS projects you love and use every day!
 blog](/static/49450bc44c3753e7348bc333a525da6f/c739e/0__TElYzEODjaORI6dr.jpg "Members of past Hacktoberfest from [GitHub](https://medium.com/u/8df3bf3c40ae) blog")
Members of past Hacktoberfest from GitHub blog
How can you Join?
If you are lucky there might be a Hacktoberfest event right in your city!
Local events provide other developers to guide you on how to contribute to open source projects on Github and how to find the right issues to fix and submit as a pull request: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events
If you don’t find a local event to your area, you can join Hacktoberfest online by following these steps:
- You will have to make from 1 to an infinite number of pull requests on any GitHub-hosted repositories/projects.
- If you make 4 pull requests you will be able to get a Hacktober official T-Shirt! Other companies are giving away more things if you contribute to the projects in this list.
You will be able to contribute to projects from Adobe, Hasura, or CircleCI: https://hacktoberfestswaglist.com/ - Sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31 on the Hacktoberfest website: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/ or go directly to this link: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/profile
Quality standards
In line with Hacktoberfest value “quantity is fun, quality is key”, here are examples of the PRs that we consider to be low-quality contributions (which are discouraged):
- PRs that are automated (e.g. scripted opening PRs to remove whitespace/optimize images)
- PRs that are disruptive (e.g. taking someone else’s branch/commits and making a PR)
- PRs that are regarded by a project maintainer as a hindrance vs. helping
- Something that’s clearly an attempt to simply +1 your PR count for October
- Last but not least, one PR to fix a typo is fine. 5 PRs to remove stray whitespace… it’s not.
You can read more details about all the rules here: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#participation-rules