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Again this year, Process Analytics participated in Hacktoberfest 2021 and it was a great success. This post highlights some of the contributions the project received and we compare this year with the results of Hacktoberfest 2020.
We offered the community the opportunity to work on our cornerstone bpmn-visualization Typescript library, its related examples repository, the project website, and the recently released R package.
The 8th annual Hacktoberfest is underway with a few important changes this year. Hacktoberfest, a virtual event sponsored by DigitalOcean and community partners, has traditionally encouraged open source contribution during the month of October by rewarding participants with a t-shirt for submitting pull requests. The initiative has added support for participation on GitLab this year, a highly requested expansion that will include more open source projects that aren’t hosted on GitHub.
Participation has grown from 676 people the first year to over 150,000 in recent years. In 2021, the program has been changed to be only applicable to opt-in repositories after being linked to an influx of spam for open source maintainers in previous years. Maintainers of popular projects were getting frustrated by wasting their time handling nonsense PR’s and marking them as spam during Hacktoberfest.
Starting this year, pull requests will only count towards participation if they are in a repository with the ‘hacktoberfest‘ topic and once they have been merged and approved by a maintainer or labeled as ‘hacktoberfest-accepted.’ Participants must contribute four accepted PR’s to an opted-in repo in order to qualify for the free, limited-edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt.
“Maintainers are the backbone of the open-source community and this year, we’re focused more than ever on ensuring maintainers are receiving the love they deserve,” DigitalOcean Senior Community Relations Manager Phoebe Quincy said. “Our maintainer-friendly rules include allowing repos to opt-in to Hacktoberfest, ensuring only accepted pull requests count towards participants’ Hacktoberfest goals, and for the first time ever, enabling maintainers to receive a Hacktoberfest t-shirt without having to submit pull requests.”
Open source maintainers and contributors can join anytime during the month until October 31st. If you maintain a WordPress-related open source project, you can get your project ready to receive contributions by adding the ‘Hacktoberfest’ topic to your repository, tagging issues with the ‘Hacktoberfest’ label, and adding a CONTRIBUTING.md file. Maintainers are also encouraged to select issues that have a well-defined scope and are self-contained. Merging PR’s, adding the ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ label, and marking ‘invalid’ or ‘spam’ contributions will all count towards engaged maintenership participation.
Hacktoberfest has started back up again for its sixth year running, sponsored by DigitalOcean and DEV. The annual event brings together open source communities from all over the world for virtual and local collaboration. Organizers are expecting approximately 150,000 participants this year.
The first 50,000 participants who make four pull requests to any GitHub-hosted repositories between October 1-31, will receive a commemorative Hacktoberfest T-shirt. Organizers have introduced a one-week review period for PRs this year in order to give maintainers the opportunity to flag any spammy PRs as invalid. The goal is to encourage participants to submit more thoughtful contributions.
More than 21,000 issues on GitHub have already been labeled for Hacktoberfest. Maintainers who want to have their projects included should identify issues best suited to new contributors and apply the “Hacktoberfest” label. Organizers also recommend creating a CONTRIBUTING.md file with contribution guidelines and adopting a code of conduct for the project.
Adding WordPress to a search for Hacktoberfest issues displays 120 issues that are related in some way to themes, plugins, apps, and other products with WordPress-specific needs. The event is a good opportunity for maintainers to get more exposure for their projects and help new contributors gain confidence through a structured contribution process.
This year Hacktoberfest’s organizers are also featuring projects focused on combating climate change. These include repos for open source technologies, such as an embeddable map that shows climate change projections, an app targeting consumption habits, and greenhouse gas emissions data packaged for exploration and charting, to name a few.
Hacktoberfest is open to contributors at any level of experience. For those just getting started, DigitalOcean has created an Introduction to Open Source series that covers the basics of git and how to create a pull request. DEV also has a Git crash course available to get new contributors up to speed.