Finally, it’s October! It is the time of the year, that the leaves begin to start changing colors and the month that contains one of my favorite holidays, Halloween! My wife and I go all out decorating our house. We even hand-spun our own 20-foot spiderweb and topped it off with ‘bodies’ on which the giant spiders feed!

However, this not what I am here to tell you about. October also brings Hacktoberfest, Digital Ocean’s a month-long hackathon. This is done in partnership with Github, and allows open source projects to participate by adding a #hacktoberfest label to open issues. I’ll be participating in this event all month by contributing to PHP projects.

Why Hacktoberfest?

It doesn’t matter if you’re new to development or an experienced developer. An event like this is a great way to help make the tools that you use every day even better. Project owners can use events like this to get more community involvement in their project. The PHP community is huge in FOSS (free and open source software) and many projects allow for contributions from developers outside of the organization.

Projects I Will Contribute To

Though it is hard to say what will be available in the time frame that I will have, there are a few projects, that I use, to which I plan to make some pull requests. The first project, that I will definitely get my hands on, is Laravel. In the framework development I do, Laravel is, absolutely, my bread and butter. Another project I have been watching for a while now and will potentially contribute to is Cachet, an open source status page system. I will be streaming live over on Livecoding.tv during my contribution time. Come join me, watch me develop, and let me know what you are working on.

How To Participate

If you are looking to help out with some projects, it is pretty easy (as long as you know how to use GIT). The first step is to choose a project, or projects, that interests you by looking at GitHub for the label #hacktoberfest. The second step is for you to jump in and fix the bug or add the enhancement. The last step is to submit a pull request back to the project. That is it! Three steps and you will have participated in the 2016 Hacktoberfest!

Stormpath Involvement

Stormpath, as the project maintainer for the PHP Integrations, will have a few issues labeled with the #hacktoberfest label. These are issues that have been placed in the repositories and are great for first-time contributors or developers that want to get more involved with contributing. I also have some more advanced issues that are accepting pull requests. Remember, all you have to do is fork the repository, make the change, and submit a PR back to us. As a bonus, all accepted PR’s to our PHP integrations will receive one of our famous Stormpath t-shirts (while supplies last)!

So, get out there and contribute to FOSS projects. Even if it is not to Stormpath, help make other projects even better than they are now! Learn more about the event at Digital Ocean and join me in Hacktoberfest!

Follow me on twitter @bretterer to find out what I am contributing to.

// Brian

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