Hacktoberfest is just around the corner. Hacktoberfest is a yearly event put on by DigitalOcean. Open source projects take contributions from anyone and the first 40,000 participants who complete Hacktoberfest (complete = four separate changes to projects that get accepted) earn either a shirt or a tree planted in their name. It's September now and you have time to prepare to jump into the fun.

Why should you participate in Hacktoberfest?

1. Make a difference.

You'd be surprised how much small changes mean for a project. The more a project scales, the easier it is for small errors to live within it. You can correct documentation, edit files that have typos, and make a meaningful difference in tech.

While fixing typos may be seemingly insignificant, across hundreds of thousands of projects, the more people do it, the more accurate and production ready open source becomes as a whole.

2. Find community.

The people who run and actively contribute to open source are amazing (almost always!). Many open source projects have a Discord or Slack for folks to socialize and share links, etc.

I've contributed to multiple open source projects and enjoyed talking with maintainers and contributors. One community that I joined earlier this year was Novu.

Another awesome part of open source is pairing with someone else (I talk more about my pairing experience here). This gets you chatting with someone who may know more than you, or at least wants to talk it out and work towards a solution.

While working through issues I was having on my local version of the project, we talked about where we live and how each place would be a great place to visit (among other things).

No matter how technical or not technical you feel you are, you can find people with common interests! The possibilities are endless for what that could do for you. You could land a job, experience a different country or town like you never have before, or finally find someone else who feels just as passionate about pickleball (for example) as you!

3. Discover newfound passion.

When you go down a new street, you might discover a new coffee shop that has a terrific atmosphere and views. Similarly when contributing to projects that you may not have been exposed to before, you might find you love machine learning, computer vision, or making sure all the tests pass when you're squashing a bug!

People tend to think that coding is only for a specific subset of individuals. The beautiful part about Hacktoberfest is it presents a chance for people from all walks of life to take off that veil and test the technical waters.

While your contributions don't have to be incredibly technical, be open minded, take the plunge, and see how you go!