Recapping Hacktoberfest #6 and Looking to Next Year

Another year, another Hacktoberfest, right? Think again! This Hacktoberfest was the best yet, and we have the stories and numbers to prove it. As we reflect on the Hacktoberfest community’s accomplishments, we wanted to showcase what worked, recognize the people who made it possible, and share some surprises, too.

The very first Hacktoberfest was six years ago, which began with a blog post and pipe dream that we could inspire a significant number of people around the world to contribute more to open source software. Because the team at DigitalOcean has always valued love, simplicity, community, and open source technology, we believed that we could translate those values into something tangible. In the last few years, the event has become more than we imagined possible. Years later, we can confidently say that it’s thanks to many maintainers, community organizers, and participants that this dream has become a reality – and, still, we’re just getting started.

A 2019 Retrospective: Results & Recognitions

What did we accomplish together in October? These are the highlights from Hacktoberfest #6:

• Pull requests from all participants: 483,127
• Participating repositories: 154,767
• Participating countries, based on addresses: 142
• Day with the most PRs: 29,742 (6%) on October 1
• *Most used license: MIT in 36,314 repositories (23.46%)
• Top language: JavaScript with 89,603 PRs (18.55%)

Pull requests each day for the top 10 languages during Hacktoberfest 2019

It would be very hard to highlight all of the great projects that participated this year. But we wanted to recognize a few with noteworthy missions: Terrastories, Gatsby, Xamarin, Accord Project, Twilio, Hacktober-board, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sensenet, and Caneco’s Logos.

*Over 50% of repositories (83,010) in Hacktoberfest had no license that GitHub could detect.

Events on Events on Events – All Around the World

We were overjoyed to see 673 in-person gatherings across 393 cities in 73 countries this year! That’s two and a half times more events than last year – which saw 267 events across 210 cities in 50 countries!

Photo of the organizing team of Open Source Montréal –a Canada meetup

The countries where the most events took place were:

1. India: 213 events (most in Bengaluru)
2. United States: 88 events (most in New York City)
3. Brazil: 52 events (most in São Paulo)
4. Germany: 41 events (most in Munich)
5. United Kingdom: 29 events (most in London)
6. Indonesia: 23 events (most in Semarang)
7. Nigeria: 18 events (most in Kano)
8. France: 17 events (most in Paris)
9. Mexico: 15 events (most in CDMX)
10. Canada: 15 events (most in Toronto & Vancouver)

Indonesia took the lead in growth – fivefold! – from four events in 2018 to 23 events in 2019. We’d also like to welcome the first-time countries who hosted events this year: Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Botswana, Congo - Kinshasa, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Hungary, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Mozambique, Panama, Paraguay, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Hacktoberfest has touched many corners of the world – and continues to expand as the event gains momentum each year. We can’t wait to see where next year leads.

Photo of Open Source Community (OSC) in CS - Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Partners Make Perfect

We’re thankful for the team at DEV for diving in as one of our sponsors this year. The DEV community was highly active all month long – and this communal effort centered on education and encouragement, which contributed to the overall participation and growth this year.

Here are the top five pieces of content curated by the DEV team, and more posts can be seen here.

1. My Hacktoberfest personal challenge: I'm writing a game in 7 days!
2. Hacktoberfest: From Decision To Completion
3. Hacktoberfest: Getting Over the Fear of Open Source
4. I finished Hacktoberfest for the first time
5. My A11y Hacktoberfest Retro

As a reward to participants, the DEV team is offering ‘Hacktoberfest 2019’ profile badges! If you participated in Hacktoberfest and are not yet a registered DEV member, sign up with your GitHub authentication. If you are an existing member, simply add GitHub authentication to your profile in your settings to claim your participation badge.

Screenshot highlighting the Hacktoberfest badge on a DEV profile.

Many of you have asked us to open source the Hacktoberfest application, so we’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that! As of today, you can officially visit and make contributions to the Hacktoberfest repo here. And we sincerely look forward to seeing you in the issues.

Next year, we plan to invest even more in community support and rewarding maintainers and event organizers. We hope there will be at least one event in every country where there is a participant. We also plan to provide more tools for maintainers, and seek out ways to reduce the climate impact of the program.

Photo courtesy of Kotis Design, showing the Hacktoberfest shirts being printed

If you’ve already received your shirt, we’d love for you to share a photo with us on social media using #Hacktoberfest! For those of you still waiting for yours, please be patient as we work to distribute them. And lastly, if you haven’t claimed your shirt, the deadline to do so is November 30.

Hacktoberfest is far from over for us at DigitalOcean, and we hope you feel the same. While we’re packing up your T-shirts (and sending them to 142 countries!), we encourage you to continue to dedicate time to make a meaningful impact on the technology you use and love.

If you have any ideas or comments you’d like to share, please do so below! As a closing, we wanted to share this video from the Hacktoberfest kickoff in NYC.