Hacktoberfest is Back!

We’re excited to announce the start of the second annual Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source software! This year, GitHub joins us as a partner in our quest to give you a cool shirt for your open source contributions.

For this year’s Hacktoberfest, we encourage everyone to contribute to open source software by making meaningful contributions to the projects you use and love. We’ve changed the minimum contributions from 50 commits to 4 pull requests. That’s right: to participate, just make 4 pull requests to any open source projects of your choice (can be more than one!). The purpose of this is to shift focus to the types of contributions being made, whether you’re fixing bugs, creating new features, or updating documentation.

We will also sponsor and host jQuery’s Developer Summit in New York City, a three-day event where members of underrepresented groups will contribute to open source projects run by the jQuery Foundation, and NYC Women Who Go’s Meetup with the Bridge Foundry.

Additionally, we have chosen 31 awesome open source projects to highlight for each day in October, inviting participants to check out, use, and contribute to them. (You aren’t limited to only these projects — use them as a reference point if you don’t know where to begin!) We’ve split them out by programming language to make it easier for you to find one that piques your interest.

To participate in Hacktoberfest, sign up on the Hacktoberfest website and open four pull requests on any GitHub-hosted open source project (or projects) of your choosing in the month of October. You will win a limited-edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt featuring GitHub’s Octocat and our very own Sammy the Shark.

We’ll send you reminders throughout the month along with our top open source project picks. What projects will you contribute to? Let us know on Twitter using the #Hacktoberfest hashtag, or tell us in the comments below!

Sign up here for Hacktoberfest!

Happy Hacking!

by Stephanie Morillo