October 1 UPDATE: additional information on how to participate is now available here.

We’re excited to announce that we’re participating in this year’s Hacktoberfest! An annual celebration of all things open source, Hacktoberfest launched as a partnership between DigitalOcean and GitHub in 2014 and rallies a global community of contributors, with last year’s event drawing more than 30K participants and nearly 240K pull requests.

This October, we’ll recognize anyone who submits a pull request to one of our open source projects with a special limited-edition T-shirt (more details below). Whether you’re a seasoned maintainer or new to the open source world, there’s something for you. Our projects span nearly all areas of computing, from developer tools and frameworks like .NET Core, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin to Kubernetes tooling like Draft and the Service Fabric container orchestrator.

Any contributions are welcome, so explore our GitHub repos, find something that interests you, and submit your first (or 100th) pull request.

We’ll share more updates over the next few weeks. In the meantime, post your questions as issues on the Hacktoberfest GitHub repo or tweet @OpenAtMicrosoft with hashtag #hacktoberfest.

To learn more about Hacktoberfest from DigitalOcean and GitHub, please visit the official Hacktoberfest page.

Get involved: how to participate

Any contributor who opens a pull request in any Microsoft repo between October 1 and October 31* will receive a special edition T-shirt, designed by Cloud Developer Advocate Ashley McNamara.

We welcome all contributions and no contribution is too small. Edits and additions to project README files or contributing to our developer documentation are great places to start.

Happy Hacktoberfest!

*Note: Contributions to Microsoft repos may also count towards participation in DigitalOcean and GitHub’s Hacktoberfest.