How to participate in Hacktoberfest

Each October thousands of people across the globe come together for Hacktoberfest, DigitalOcean’s annual celebration of all things open source that gets people involved in open source and gets them working together to improve the software powering our world today. There are many ways for people of all skill levels to contribute to open source during Hacktoberfest, even for folks who aren’t technical.

Here are a few ways you—yes, you!—can support open source:

• Prepare and share your open source project for collaboration

• Contribute to the betterment of a project by contributing pull/merge requests

• Organize a Hacktoberfest event

• Mentor others in the open-source community

• Donate money directly to open-source projects you love

People in the community doing cool stuff

Did you know that companies and their employees participate in Hacktoberfest from all over the world, but you might not hear about it because they gather internally. A great example of this is Intuit, which has held internal hackathons for Hacktoberfest since 2019. In their own words,

“Open source is an important part of Intuit tech culture. By fostering a culture of contribution and collaboration within our engineering community, we help advance Intuit’s mission to power the prosperity of more than 100 million customers around the world, across Intuit’s platform and products—including TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp. As we deepen our commitment to open source, our engineers are becoming even more open in the way they share, adopt, and use code. Our culture celebrates those with the passion and drive to contribute to open source projects, whether their own or others, as a way to bring new and better digital experiences to life.

That’s part of what makes the open source community so amazing. What started as a small commitment to launch a Hacktoberfest program, turned out to have a huge impact. We each play our own small role, but together, we can achieve things much bigger than we ever imagined.”

Learn more about Open Source at Intuit, and make sure to participate in this year’s Hacktoberfest!

Open-source projects seeking contributions

Hacktoberfest sponsors and partners have a host of projects that are open to contributions—some are even incentivizing contributions in pretty cool ways. Learn more about how you can participate with them.

DigitalOcean

Celebrate Hacktoberfest with DigitalOcean, the originators of this decade long open-source software celebration. Built on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, DigitalOcean lets you focus on creating apps, not handling infrastructure. Dive into a plethora of DigitalOcean projects participating in Hacktoberfest. Whether you’re versed in nginx/vue, terraform, or an Ansible enthusiast, opportunities to contribute await. Dive in now!

ILLA Cloud

ILLA Cloud is an open-source,low-code developer tool with AI Agent Features, so developers can build business apps much easier. It’s really exciting to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hacktoberfest together with developers. We prepared ILLA Packages with badges, stickers and Magnets as physical rewards to contributors, and four digital badges for different PRs merged. Feel free to check out the details here. ILLA Cloud also made a tutorial video for new contributors and please check it out before you start to contribute. Following Contributing Docs and Discorc Community might help you too when you need any technical support from ILLA Cloud Team.

Appwrite

Appwrite is back for the third year in a row, and excited to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hacktoberfest! We look forward to this amazing open-source community event that celebrates collaboration, creativity, and everything open source. This year we will be looking to the community to help out on a feature we love: Functions. With it being one of our most diverse features, it’s the perfect opportunity to contribute to Appwrite. From creating ready to use templates, to code contributions, and much more. Visit our Hacktoberfest website for more information on how to join!

Amplication

Open source has always been at the core of what we do, and Hacktoberfest is an excellent opportunity to get more developers to join the community and support their favorite projects. There are several ways that you can contribute to Amplication as well. We’re inviting contributions across all our repositories, with an emphasis on the following four repos:

• Amplication main amplication/amplication](https://github.com/amplication/amplication)) repository,

• Docs amplication/docs](https://github.com/amplication/docs)) where our project documentation lives,

• Amplication Plugins amplication/plugins](https://github.com/amplication/plugins)) that extend our platform’s functionality,

• and finally, our website’s repository amplication/amplication-site.](https://github.com/amplication/amplication-site).)

This Hacktoberfest season, we’re going beyond just code contributions. We’ve lined up a series of events to make your Hacktoberfest experience even more engaging and rewarding. From an opening ceremony to numerous giveaways, we’ve got a lot in store for the community.Join Amplication’s Discord channel,) Discord](https://amplication.com/discord),). It’s the central hub where all communications will happen, so you won’t miss out on anything. Get plugged in now and let’s make this Hacktoberfest unforgettable!

Runme

Runme is a collection of open source repos hosted on Github, so there’s a number of places to contribute dependending on what interests you.

• stateful/runme is the markdown parser and CLI written in Go, and /issues contains many issues outlining feature requests, bugs to fix and maintenance work.

• vscode-runme is the VS Code extension that renders the interactive notebooks, it’s written in typescript and there is always much to do in expanding its utility (more custom cells and integrations, more languages to support, more tests, etc)

• stateful/docs.runme.dev is our documentation website built with docusaurus and we could always use help making these better!

If you have an idea of something you’d like to contribute, please join Runme’s Discord channel or Github and give us a brief description of your plans so we can give you feedback and direction if possible.

OpenSauced

At OpenSauced, we believe in redefining the meaning of contributions, and we’re providing the space where contributors meet maintainers in a celebration of open source excellence. This Hacktoberfest, sign up with OpenSauced and elevate your open-source experience. Whether you’re contributing code, writing issues, or crafting blog posts, we’re providing a space for contributors to share their hard work and inspire others. For maintainers, OpenSauced offers unparalleled insights to truly understand your project’s contributions. Dive into analytics, spotlight highlights, and jointly celebrate the diverse efforts that fuel your project’s success. By focusing on genuine contributions and creating highlights, you’re not just getting noticed—you’re setting a standard in the community. Move beyond the “green square” mindset. Get noticed, make a difference, and redefine open source collaboration with OpenSauced.

GitHub

GitHub’s thrilled to celebrate 10 years of Hacktoberfest participants building on GitHub. Look for livestreams on open source projects throughout the month. For students, every week GitHub Education will host engaging Livestreams on Campus TV and spotlight the week’s top maintainers and contributors on Community Exchange and across the blog and social channels. For those who want to contribute to GitHub’s own open source repos, GitHub Docs and Oktokit are participating this year!

GitLab

GitLab is proud to once again partner with Hacktoberfest and celebrate the power of open source collaboration all month long. We’re connecting passionate developers with participating communities who’ve added the “hacktoberfest” topic to their projects on GitLab. Celebrate 10 years of Hacktoberfest by browsing our directory to find a project awaiting your contribution. And don’t forget to explore the GitLab project, too! Our open core DevSecOps platform also needs your contributions. Join us for our Hackathon to learn more.

DEV

DEV is a welcoming community of software developers that shares coding resources and advice. We’re proud to be powered by Forem, an open-source software designed to empower online communities. For the sixth consecutive year, we’re thrilled to team up with DigitalOcean to support Hacktoberfest, an event that resonates deeply with our values. At DEV, we strongly believe that diversity of perspectives enriches the open-source community, and we’re proud to be part of an initiative that embraces individuals from all walks of life.

This year, we’re rallying all DEV members, whether you’re a seasoned contributor or brand new to the community, for an exciting Hacktoberfest adventure! Participants in Hacktoberfest 2023 can earn multiple badges from DEV, recognizing their contributions as contributors or maintainers, with associated rewards including validation and community engagement.

Earning the Hacktoberfest 2023 DEV badge series is closely linked to your active participation in the DEV community and writing posts on DEV. To begin your journey, create or log into your DEV account now and get ready to showcase your skills, connect with a global community, and earn fantastic rewards! Learn more

DagsHub

DagsHub is where people build AI projects. A centralized platform to host and collaborate on all ML project components such as code, data, models, experiments, and annotations**.** Built on top of popular open-source tools (MLflow, DVC, Label Studio), DagsHub does the DevOps heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on creating better models. Join us for a month-long celebration of open-source contributions to Machine Learning projects. Gain hands-on experience building datasets, models, pipelines, and more! From non-code contributors to Binary Sorcerers, there are projects for everyone!

Hugging Face

Hugging Face is the Open Source AI platform that allows people to build collaborative ML by sharing and using models, datasets, and applications. Use Hacktoberfest as an opportunity to learn about the HF Hub and build your first ML app! Hugging Face has built dozens of OS tools for ML, such as transformers, datasets, and gradio, and contributions are welcomed in all of them! Feel free to head to the organization and explore the projects!

Paperspace

Paperspace recently joined DigitalOcean, expanding our AI capabilities. Paperspace is the compute partner for GPT4All, an open-source, free-to-use, locally running, privacy-aware chatbot. No GPU or internet required. GPT4All is an ecosystem to train and deploy powerful and customized large language models that run locally on consumer grade CPUs. Check out the GPT4All Github repo and contribute!

Holopin

As Hacktoberfest unfolds, participants can make their contributions even more vibrant by showing them off to the world. If you’ve earned a badge for your accepted PR/MRs, don’t forget to claim it and share it on social media by tagging #hacktoberfest and #holopin, and add your badge board to your GitHub profile. This is not only a testament to your dedication but also a way to inspire other developers in the open source community. For maintainers keen on issuing custom Holopin badges for contributions to their own repositories, head over to holopin.io/pricing to explore the various options available.

Major League Hacking

Join Major League Hacking for Global Hack Week, a monthly event series where you can learn new skills, build your portfolio, attend fun sessions, and connect with developers from around the world. The Open Source edition of Global Hack Week is taking place October 16th-23rd! Learn how to find and contribute to open-source projects through 50+ workshops. The event is completely free to attend, register here to unlock the sessions and event perks!

Tree-Nation

Planting trees has been proven to be one of the most efficient solutions to fight Climate Change and we have already planted more than 34.000.000 with all our community. Through the Tree-Nation platform we aim to bring a technological solution to the problem of deforestation, responsible for about 17% of all climate change emissions. Thanks to our reforestation and conservation projects we help to restore forests and also we create jobs, support local communities and protect biodiversity. Hacktoberfest created a very beautiful forest with us that has more than 4.000 trees planted. Join Tree-Nation, join our mission and let’s reforest the world together!

We look forward to seeing how you participate this year! Have fun and happy hacking!

Phoebe Quincy, Senior Community Relations Manager