Hacktoberfest is back. Contribute to open source and get a cool T-shirt

Hacktoberfest is an event GitHub and Digital Ocean hosts in October to promote open source and encourage participation of community in open source projects.

This time around, if you submit 5 pull requests to any projects that are hosted as public repositories on Github, you’ll be eligible for a cool T-shirt. Last year, I participated in this event and I got a cool shirt that I’m still using.

Follow these steps to get started:

1. Register for Hacktoberfest

• You need a GitHub account. If you don’t have one yet, sign up on GitHub

2. Submit your first pull request with First Contributions

• Follow the hands-on tutorial in the Readme of First Contributions. Once you finish the tutorial, you’d have submitted a pull request to First Contributions repo itself.

The best part is that, you don’t need to know the process beforehand. You can learn about the process by following the tutorial.

• You can find a link in this page to check your progress

For you, it should say that you’re 4 pull requests away from earning the t-shirt and your progress should be 1/5.

4. Submit 4 more pull requests

There are plenty of projects that’d be super happy to have you as a contributor. First contributions has a web app that can help you to find these projects. Go to https://firstcontributions.github.io/ and find a project that you might be interested to contribute to. You can search and filter projects too.

You can also checkout issues in projects of First contributions

If you find any projects that was easy for you to contribute to and want to add it in our web app, submit a pull request addressing this issue.

Remember, there will be plenty of projects you can contribute to. Try to submit quality pull requests that really help the community. Changes where you can learn something, where you’re giving back to the community.

That’s it. Once you submit 5 pull requests, you’ll receive a mail from organisers of hacktoberfest conforming your qualification.

Some cool stuff you can do to continue contributing.

Hacktoberfest could be your first step in contributing to open source projects.

• I’d encourage you to join our slack team to continue contributing and to be part of the community. We’re a bunch of people who likes open source and welcoming more people to the community. You can reach out to us for any help on the subject.
• You can join first contributions organisation on GitHub. It feels quite nice to be part of this awesome organisation. ?✨

FAQ

1. Should the issue/pull request have ‘Hacktoberfest’ tag to be considered?

No, any pull request to public repositories will be considered.

2. What if pull requests are not accepted?

Even if it is not accepted, it’ll be counted.

3. Does that mean that I can submit any change?

Yeah, but please don’t do it. Please don’t participate just for the T-shirt. Participate to become a part of open source community. Maintainers of the projects you’ll be contributing to will have to spend time to review your pull request. Please don’t waste their time.

Closing notes:

First contributions has helped over 6000 people to start contributing to open source so far. I’m expecting that number to cross 8000 by the end of this October.

Please leave some claps and share this article if you liked it and found it useful. I’d love you hear your thoughts in the comments.

Cheers.