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Gavin Pickin

October 23, 2018

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October has been a busy month, so we are late sharing this information, but with over a week left in October, you have plenty of time to earn your free t-shirt. HacktoberFest is celebrating it's 5th year this year, and will be giving away 50,000 t-shirts this year, to those contributing 5 pull requests to open source projects on github.

HacktoberFest is presented by DigitalOcean, Github and Twilio. Three great companies/tools that Ortus Solutions uses in our own projects and in our client projects. Ortus Solutions is built upon Opensource with our flagship products all opensource, this event holds a special place in our hearts.

Below is just a snippet of information from their site: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio.

  • Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in our global community!
  • Five quality pull requests must be submitted to public GitHub repositories.
  • You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31.

Rules

To get a shirt, you must make five pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any timezone. PRs can be to any public repo on GitHub, not just the ones highlighted. The PR must contain commits you made yourself (not to your own repo). PRs reported by maintainers as spam or that are automated will be marked as invalid and won't count towards the shirt. This year, the first 50,000 of you can earn a T-shirt (compared with 30,000 in 2017).

As of today, there are still 25,000 shirts available to claim. You can see if your friends have signed up by checking their stats: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/stats/gpickin

Remember, if you are a core contributor, and you don't make pulls, but just push straight to the repo, it will not show. When we look at Brad 'the machine' Wood, we see only a few pull requests even though he has done a lot of work on CommandBox. He got this Hacktober shirt last year, will he get one this year?

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/stats/bdw429s

You can learn github by contributing to many repos setup just for hacktoberfest beginners. Remember, documentation is still contributing. Maybe contribute some example code to https://cfdocs.org/ and become one of the 100+ awesome contributors listed on the homepage of CFDocs. Or fix that latino spelling or grammar we have in our ColdBox docs https://coldbox.ortusbooks.com/. One of my pull requests was a single missing / in some documentation for quasar, but it all helps.

Some companies tag their projects or issues with hacktoberfest. Want to get more than one shirt? Some like SendGrid and Auth0 even are giving your additional shirts from their organization if you meet their criteria.

If you are new to github, or a veteran, contribute to open source this month, and earn a shirt, and hopefully you'll like the feeling, and keep contributing to opensource.

Happy Hacktoberfest, pull a little, give a little, and get a lot.

Major Ortus Solution Repositories

Ortus Solutions Documentation

Resources

Git

Open Source

Open source 101

Where to find Open Source projects to work on?

GitHub

Hacktoberfest

Find more resources and useful tips for participants on the Hacktoberfest site.

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