What is HacktoberFest?
Hacktoberfest (hack + October + fest) is Digitalocean's annual event that encourages people to contribute to free and open-source software(FOSS) throughout October. Github and sponsors of Hacktoberfest offer a pretty t-shirt as swag to people who complete Hacktoberfest challenge of submitting 4 non-spam pull requests to any of the FOSS project on github. Hacktoberfest 2022 is 9th edition of hacktoberfest.
How to Participate?
Register on Hacktoberfest.
Pull requests can be made in any GITHUB hosted project that’s participating in Hacktoberfest
Project maintainers must accept your pull/merge requests for them to count towards your total
Have 4 pull/merge requests accepted between October 1 and October 31 to complete Hacktoberfest
Hacktoberfest for all
Participating in an open source not just intended for technical people who want to write code. Many opportunities exist for you to apply your professional skills in support of open-source Projects.
Here are some examples of ways in which non-code contributors can contribute to open-source projects:
How to contribute?
You can find github hosted project that’s participating in Hacktoberfest here You must be familiar with Github. but if you are not then that's not a big deal you can easily learn how to use GitHub.
Find the required Repository
Fork the Repository
Make Changes in forked Repository by adding code. You can find more info here
Now that everything is set, it's time to let our maintainer know what we have added. We can do this by creating Pull Request with detailed description of what we have added.
Soon the maintainer will merge all your changes into the master branch of this project (unless they need changes from you). You will get a notification email once the changes have been merged. Your PR must have the “hacktoberfest-accepted” label, or have an overall approving review.
Once your Pull Requests pass all the checks above, it will be accepted for hacktoberfest after the 7-day review period.
My Experience
This was my first open source contribution. I started of small with contributing to the simple Projects. Contributing to open source is not that difficult as it seems to be. Many repositories are available for beginners. Even Project maintainers know that this might be your first Open Source contribution if they have labelled the issue as first-timers-only or similar while checking your PR. Your contribution can be anything like writing description, adding some hyperlinks or a small learning project. Overall ,This really helped me to understand the purpose of a pull-request and to understand the process of making a contribution.
HacktoberFest’s swag is too pretty to be earned like this and also one shouldn’t miss on such good opportunity to learn and feel proud by contributing to the communities favorite projects.
That's all, then. I would advise making a contribution to free and open-source software(FOSS) in order to gain knowledge and a free t-shirt. Please feel free to remark below if you see something is erroneous/inaccurate because I am still a script kiddie.