Just like the last 10 years, the tradition of hacktoberfest continues - an amazing celebration of open source!

If you don’t already know about it, chances are you are new to open-source ecosystem. You should definitely have a read about how open source can change you career trajectory.

This brief guides will be helpful to you across your hacktoberfest journey. So hopefully you'll read it till the end :D

Here's what is covered -

1. How to get started with Hacktoberfest 👋
2. Useful resources to kickstart your hacktoberfest journey 🚀
3. Prizes for hacktoberfest 🏆
4. How to win a T-Shirt even when its discontinued in Hacktoberfest 2023? 👕
5. The dark side of hacktoberfest 🔴
6. Interesting communities to join 👥
7. Fun & Learnings in open-source 🥳🤩

How to get started with Hacktoberfest 👋

The registrations for hacktoberfest 2023 have already started and you can visit the official website to register yourself asap. The last day to register is Oct 31 so do not wait. You might also want to register for Collectiv x Hacktoberfest. More details on it later in the post. The rules are simple - raise PRs to any hacktoberfest labelled repository. If any 4 PRs get merged, you have successfully completed the hacktoberfest challenge! Isn’t that simple?

Useful resources to kickstart your hacktoberfest journey 🚀

If you are a beginner in development or newly starting out your OSS journey, you might face some challenges. Biggest one could be how to find the issues that you can solve 😮‍💨

Here are some resources to land you some good issues & to get you across your OSS journey.

1. Find an issue to solve at First Issue - This website curates accessible issues from popular open-source projects, and helps you make your next contribution to open-source.
2. Learn the Do's and Don'ts of OSS Contributions - This guide is a very good collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open-source project.
3. Official Hacktoberfest 2023 website - You can find exciting events and more resources related to hacktoberfest here.
4. Collectiv AI - Collectiv helps you tackle a bigger problem once you have found the issue you want to solve. How do you even get started with an unfamiliar codebase? Collectiv helps you to have an AI assistant on top of any codebase that can help you understand the code, generate better documentation it and continuously help you as you solve the issues!

Prizes for Hacktoberfest 🏆

Unlike the last 9 editions of hacktoberfest, sadly this time you do not get a T-Shirt when your 4 PRs get merged. There’s an entire explanation on the same on the official website. However, you get a tree planted in your name if you are one of the first 50,000 participants to get 4 PRs accepted. There are also digital reward kits for everyone.

How to win a T-Shirt even when its discontinued in Hacktoberfest 2023? 👕

There are still ways in which you can get that T-Shirt when your participate in Hacktoberfest 2023.

Collectiv - an AI tool built to search & understand unfamiliar codebases is sponsoring merch for all the hacktoberfest participants who use Collectiv to solve issues and raise PRs 🥳

Why would you want to use an AI tool for your contribution you may ask? Well, when you jump into an unfamiliar OSS codebase, you will find yourself searching for a lot of answers about how something in the codebase works, or going through the docs to understand the codebase, etc. Collectiv’s AI can help you do all that just by asking it questions much like you would on ChatGPT.

The best part is Collectiv is made specifically for code, has the latest context of every codebase, unlike cutoff of 2021 for ChatGPT. More than 10,000 devs already use Collectiv to search, understand and contribute to 2000+ OSS projects. ✅

You can check out more details here. Fill this form, use collectiv for solving issues and Collectiv will send some cool merch wherever you are in the world!

The dark side of hacktoberfest 🔴

A lot of us miss this out, but hacktoberfest has also garnered some bad reputation over the years. Refer to this post on HN to know more.

TLDR is that a lot of people raise spammy PRs, just to get their hands on a T-Shirt as fast as possible. It does not drive any meaningful contributions to OSS and make the life of already strained maintainers even tougher. This could also be one of the reasons why T Shirts were continued.

Hacktoberfest organisers have take various steps to reduce spammy PRs and eliminate bad actors from the system. On similar lines, we at Collectiv also believe that there is a lot more to the tradition of hacktoberfest than T Shirts.

We hope that now with an AI expert sitting right beside every dev who’s participating in hacktoberfest, it will become easier and more accessible to make higher impact and more meaningful contributions than doing simple documentation changes, not that they are any less important. But you get the intent. So this hacktoberfest, let’s really try to make meaningful contributions, whether you’re using AI or not.

Interesting communities to join 👥

Hacktoberfest is fun I heard? Yesss! It is damn fun. You can hangout with people from all across the world in various communities, made especially for hacktoberfest. You can join Hacktoberfest’s Official Discord channel.
At Collectiv, we are hosting multiple hangouts sessions and have a dedicated channel for all hacktoberfest participants! Join Collectiv’s Discord and be updated on all our swag announcements, hacktoberfest resources and also get help from our team in your OSS contribution journey. We are always looking to hangout with you!

Fun & Learning in open-source 🥳🤩

At the end of the day, open source is all about making a positive impact on the world, with software and collaboration. It’s a gateway to learn so much more than taught in traditional programming courses. You meet a bunch of amazing people in the journey and have tons of fun building cool stuff. I really don’t think any developer today in the world can do their work without open source software. Let’s make this hacktoberfest an amazing testament to the spirit of open-source!!

Lessgoooo hack!! Originally published on Collectiv's Blog