Hacktoberfest 2019

Send some pull requests and get a free t-shirt! Hacktoberfest is back for a seventh year to encourage cross-project participation. DigitalOcean wants you to register for Hacktoberfest (no purchase required) then open five pull requests to public repositories on GitHub. Get your feet wet with open source and git; once you see how easy it is you’ll probably come back for more. And you’ll get a nice Hacktoberfest t-shirt.

Other companies have their own swag to add to your haul when you contribute to their projects. You can even contribute to that list with a pull request to add your swag.

Find something to hack

Perl.com has some website issues you might consider. Or, you can write an article for Perl.com and send that as a pull request. Or, read some of the older articles and edit them to fix typos, new web addresses, and so on. Since Perl.com is its own GitHub project, almost anything you see is updatable. If you don’t know where to change something, we’ll help you figure it out.

I maintain the PerlPowerTools project and there are several niggling style issues that I’d like to handle so I can improve PerlPowerTool’s score on kritika.io, which is currently an F based on most of this code being written in a style more palatable 20 years ago.

Perl.com has a GitHub issue where some projects have listed their interest (and check for others that might show up after we post this article):

To help you get your Pull Request accepted, Mohammad S Anwar has some advice:

Get help with your issues

You don’t have to do anything special to get help, but here are a few tips. Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily to convert people to core contributors, so start with something gentle that can draw in the curious.

When people contribute, be insanely positive–help people learn how to make good pull requests and integrate their work into your project. Remember that successful projects blend all sorts of skills and perspectives, and this is your chance to let other people hack on the stuff you didn’t want to do yourself.

Here are some ways you can encourage that work:

Create some GitHub issues for small work you’d like other people to try. These don’t need to be complex and they don’t need to be actual code. Something like “Update the README” or “Add the LICENSE file” don’t require that much knowledge of your core code.

Label some of your projects GitHub issues with the “hacktoberfest” or “good first issue” tags. Make these bite-sized chunks appropriate for beginners.

Label the issues based on their domain, such as “website design”, “coding”, or “documentation”.

Offer some swag. A $5 t-shirt can get your several hundred dollars worth of work that you’ve been putting off.

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Cover image © DigitalOcean