What is Hactoberfest & why should you care about it ?

Hactoberfest in open source initiative by Digital Ocean organized to encourage developers to contribute, participate to give back to the community. It’s a month long celebration of open source software. It was started in 2014. People from all over the world contributed to make it a huge success. It is now a regular event in October every year. In the end, you get a free t-shirt delivered at your doorstep.

There are many ways to contribute like -

• by completing pull requests, participating in events, and donating to open source projects.

1. Sign up for GitHub ( If you haven’t your GitHub account yet)
2. Go to Hactoberfest website , Sign In using your GitHub credentials.
3. Find projects using Search bar at top left corner of GitHub page.
4. Search relevant issues which are open, not fixed. You can type label:hactoberfest is:issue is:open
5. You can also go to left navigation bar and search for issues => states => open
6. Then you can also select language like Python, JavaScript and check open issues in them.
7. If you are a beginner and can’t find good issues then there’s tag label:good first issue which filters out issues for beginners who want to contribute.
8. Any issue which you want to contribute to which does not have a label of Hactoberfest label ; it would still count as a contribution to Hactoberfest if you do it in specified period (1st to — 31st October ).
9. you can use Visual Studio Code to contribute. Also, download GitHub Desktop After selecting open issue then clone and fork it (download it) to your machine, edit, make necessary changes.
10. That’s it ! Do finish the task and create Pull Request (PR)

We use many software’s free just because they are open source for example VLC media player , WordPress, Linux, blender etc. Doing open source is like giving back to the community.

If you’re a beginner and don’t have a job in the industry then contributing to open source is a easiest way to get real-world software development experience. Just by doing this you network with great people of the industry and they review your code , give suggestions to improve and a lot other things. So, Just start contributing& make the world better place to live !