Introduction

Hello there, dear reader! Before we begin, this article is largely inspired by the awesome-for-beginners repo and the first-timers-only blog post which are great sources to keep in mind too!

Well, in the last few days, you might have seen a whole movement towards Hacktoberfest contributions — an annual event that encourages developers worldwide to contribute to open-source projects throughout October — and I really think it’s an awesome way to get you going with a bunch of different things, from experience to best practices, and don’t worry: there’s still time to contribute!

In this article, we'll explore 30 awesome repositories — and I’ll choose one for you if you think decision paralysis is taking the lead — that are perfect for contributing during this amazing event. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, there's something here for everyone and, to do that, I’ll try my best to sort those repos by interest! So, let’s dive in :)

How to Use This List & Tips for Successful Contributions

In the past, I’ve also written an article on how to start contributing, in case you want a quick deep dive on it, you can find it here. But, here are the essential points to get successful contributions:

• Register yourself in Hacktoberfest: It is always important to remember to go to the Hacktoberfest website and put your name up there 🚀
• Read contribution and event guidelines: Each project has its own set of guidelines (and so does Hacktoberfest). Make sure to read and follow them carefully — in repos, they are generally in the README or CONTRIBUTING files, so, this is the first place to check!
• Start with beginner-friendly issues: Look for issues labeled as "good first issue" or "beginner-friendly" to get started and don't forget to comment/assign yourself to them.
• Write clear commit messages and communicate with project maintainers: Your commit messages should clearly explain what changes you've made and why. A cool guide on that is Conventional Commits (just in case the repo itself doesn’t have a convention regarding commit formatting). Unsure about how things work on the repo? Don't hesitate to ask questions!
• Create comprehensive pull requests: When submitting a pull request, provide a clear description of your changes and any relevant context — always remember: there’s another human being on the other side of the screen and they have a ton of other Pull Requests to review, so, make it as easy as possible for them to go through your modifications.

So, to use this list is a simple process: Go through the available categories, find one that you enjoy, follow the quick guide above, and go write some contributions!

Paralyzed by too many decisions? I’ve chosen one for you.

So, firstly, before we jump ahead in the categories itself, if you feel that you might get a little overwhelmed by all those repositories with different categories, I chose one for you to start contributing and overcoming the paralysis ;). It’s Frontend AI — a sponsor of this article, but also, a really really cool project and v0 alternative.

It’s super simple to contribute, simply go to the Frontend AI page, build a quick template enjoying the help of AI-assisted code, submit it through the Hacktoberfest button, and wait for a review!

The cool part here? You’re actually creating a reusable block of code that other people are going to be able to put on their websites with a simple click. To be fair, I still remember the proudness of delivering my first reusable component in a corporate environment and seeing it live, so, I hope you’d get the same feeling here.

⚡ Check out Frontend AI ⚡

THE LIST:

BTW, the really easy ones for you to start contributing are going to be marked with a ✅

Web Development

• freeCodeCamp: An open-source codebase and curriculum for learning to code! What’s more delightful than contributing to learning? You can find more on this issue. ✅
• Axios: The old-school (but not so much) way of making requests.
• Jest: Want to get your hand on the testing side of things? Check out Jest!
• Strapi: Interested in Content Management Systems? This one is a beast!
• Excalidraw: Amazing project, I literally use this guy on an almost daily basis
• You Don’t Need JavaScript: Great project to showcase the power of CSS by itself! Give it a look 😎
• Appwrite: A really cool BaaS for you to go quickly on the backend side

Mobile Development

• React Navigation: Routing and navigation for your React Native apps
• Open Food Facts: Scan food products or their barcode to obtain data on ingredients, additives, and nutrition facts (this one hits home for me — I’m celiac, so it's super useful!) ✅
• Fastlane: App (iOS and Android) releases made easy.
• Termux: a terminal emulator application for Android OS extendible by a variety of packages.
• NativeScript: Empowering JavaScript with native platform APIs.

Data Science and Machine Learning

• Hugging Face: Transformers: State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Pytorch, TensorFlow, and JAX.
• Julia: The Julia programming language!
• Gradio: Build and share delightful machine-learning apps, all in Python. ✅
• OpenBB: Investment Research for Everyone, Everywhere.
• scrapi: This one doesn’t necessarily relate to data science and all, but, since scraping things is often a middle step, I think you might find it important too!

DevOps and Infrastructure

• Kubernetes: Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management — one of the greatest communities out there ;)
• Grafana: Because Infrastructure needs observability ✅
• Gitea: Self-hosted git, amazing project.
• external-secrets: reads information from a third-party service like AWS Secrets Manager and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets.
• Prometheus: The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

Miscellaneous/Cross-platform

• GitHub Readme Stats: A cool and awesome way to make your README look great!
• Auth0: Interested in authentication? Auth0 is a beast.
• Home Assistant: Open-source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.
• Free Programming Books: Freely available books! ✅
• Cockatrice: Cross-platform virtual tabletop! Couldn’t make a list without a game related thing ;)
• Developer Roadmap: Making a career path is hard, this, makes you easily navigate them.
• HacktoberWall: A simple webpage, for you to put your name on and make a quick win! ✅
• hoppscotch: An open-source alternative to Postman and Insomnia!
• Awesomes: This one is a general idea — have a cool resource of some language? Share it in the awesome , e.g. Awesome Go!

Conclusion

Hey! You managed to get to the end and I hope that you found a cool/or a few cool repos to contribute to! It’s an awesome way to give a little something back to the community and feel free to make that Holopin that you’ll get shine!

Remember, open-source contributions are not just about code. They're about collaboration, learning, and making a positive impact on the global developer community — so please, take your time to grow and collaborate, showcase your work, and fly up high.

So there’s that. Take this to inspire you to, while we are at the end of October, get those last days to give those repos some love and make the world a cooler place!