What is Hacktoberfest? And why should you take part in it?
October is coming! You may ask what’s so special about it — well, for the normies, I can say — yeah, it’s the month of Halloween! But for all my computer sciences pals, I will reply that it’s the month of Hacktoberfest — a month-long celebration of open source development.
Now, what exactly is “open source”? And why are we celebrating it? According to opensource.com, “Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.” And don’t misinterpret the word “open source” as being free. So, what makes it so amazing is that it promotes a community where anyone ( programmers, designers, technical writers, etc.)from anywhere in the world can be part of it and contribute to developing software! And the world gets better end-user products — it’s a win-win situation. Your favorite media player, VLC, or your favorite browser, Brave, is open source. The OS that most of the servers in the world use, Linux, is open source. If you want, you can add your features to them and get them merged in their “main” directory if it has followed their contribution guidelines.
Digital Ocean, the one who backs Hacktoberfest, and a few communities give perks for the contributions during October. For 4 PRs (pull requests) merged in an open source hacktoberfest-accepted project on GitHub/GitLab, you can get a Hacktoberfest ’22 T-shirt, or you can have them plant a tree on your name (relatively eco-friendly, huh)!
From my perspective as an IT Undergrad, Hacktoberfest is about an opportunity where we can implement the skills that we learn during our course by contributing to open source projects. We can let our zeal for software development get direction by working on industry-level software. But don’t get intimidated if you are just a beginner, because there are a lot of beginner-friendly projects in hacktoberfest as well! And there are some for non-programmers ( like UI/UX, Designs, Prototyping, technical writing, and documentation ) to shine.
Here I am attaching a link for the official site, don’t forget to register — it will be open from 26 September!
Happy Hacking!
Thanks for reading my article.
