Join us this Hacktoberfest

This month marks the 11th year of Hacktoberfest, a month-long virtual event that encourages developers to contribute to the open source projects that so many of us rely on. What started as a small hackathon founded by DigitalOcean in 2014 has now morphed into a month when the global developer community comes together virtually. During Hacktoberfest, tens of thousands of developers donate their time and expertise to help maintain open source technologies. It’s an important month not just for encouraging participation in open source projects, but also for developers to learn new skills, teach others, and connect with the wider community. This year’s Hacktoberfest is significant to me as it marks my first as CEO of DigitalOcean, so I thought I’d bring you along as I dive into the history of the event, and why open source is critical to the developer community.

Want to jump straight into participating? Registration is now open at Hacktoberfest.com.

Why support open source?

At its core, Hacktoberfest is a celebration of open source, the projects that power much of today’s most popular websites and applications. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the internet as we know it would look very different without open source projects, and these projects are often maintained and updated by developers on their own time, with little to no budget. Open source is the backbone of tech today, and developers who maintain and contribute to these projects are the backbone of open source.

Hacktoberfest aims to rally even more developers, including those new and returning to open source, to give back to these projects during a dedicated month. By participating in Hacktoberfest, developers can make tangible improvements to the tools millions of people use daily, while learning new skills and meeting fellow members of the developer community along the way.

The history of Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest started out in 2014 as a small hackathon organized by DigitalOcean—the first year had 676 participants who each completed 50 commits to various open source projects. At the time of the inaugural Hacktoberfest, DigitalOcean was a relatively new cloud provider focused on providing developers with simple and performant virtual machines so they could build without the complexity or costs of hyperscalers. Hacktoberfest was, and is still today, aligned strongly with DigitalOcean’s mission of enabling developers to spend more time creating software that changes the world.

Over the last decade, Hacktoberfest has expanded to become a much larger virtual event, with over 98,000 people contributing to the effort in 2023. It has evolved in other ways as well, including supporting projects on GitLab as well as GitHub, the addition of checks to increase the quality of pull/merge requests, and allowing projects to opt-in to the program each year to ensure it doesn’t become a burden for open source maintainers.

The impact of Hacktoberfest

Last year, 98,855 people from 184 countries registered for Hacktoberfest, and there were 118,469 contributions, with 139,422 repositories opted-in to participate. Over the ten years of Hacktoberfest so far, there have been over 2.4 million accepted pull/merge requests for open source projects. Everyone who has participated in Hacktoberfest should be proud of this huge achievement, but what makes me even more excited is hearing stories from those benefiting from the contributions made during Hacktoberfest, and I can’t wait to hear about what is accomplished for open source this year.

For example, in 2021, we heard from the maintainer of Boa Constrictor, a .NET Screenplay Pattern that helps with Web UI and REST API test automation:

“Hacktoberfest 2021 was a smashing success for Boa Constrictor! We completed 41 pull requests with 151 commits and over 10K new lines of code from 11 total contributors. Here’s a summary of everything we accomplished together.”

Last year, one of many stories we heard was from Amruth Pillai, who maintains Reactive Resume, who mentioned:

“Throughout this period, the project experienced a surge in activity, with numerous new features, bug reports, and issues contributed by both users and contributors. This collective effort strengthened the project’s resilience and security.”

DigitalOcean’s commitment to Hacktoberfest

One of the things that I love about Hacktoberfest is that it’s truly a community event that transcends any one company—while DigitalOcean is the founding sponsor of Hacktoberfest, it’s the community of developers that keeps the event going, along with other companies who sponsor the event including Cloudflare and Quira. Within DigitalOcean, we have a passionate group of employees who spend time creating the Hacktoberfest website, sending emails, answering community questions, and tracking pull/merge requests, in addition to all of their responsibilities outside of Hacktoberfest. I want to thank these employees and all of those outside of DigitalOcean involved in making Hacktoberfest a great event this year, and for many years to come.

At DigitalOcean, we believe strongly in the developer and open source community, and that the more accessible tools are to developers, the more they can create great software. We can’t wait to see how you make an impact this Hacktoberfest—sign up to participate at Hacktoberfest.com today, and happy hacking!