Hello people!
I am Vikas Singh. I like to document what I learn every day. I am a teacher by passion and a UI UX designer by Profession. Apart from that, I love to teach people and share my knowledge with them. This is going to be my first post on Dev.to. If you are new to Open-source community and want to get started right now, then you must read this post.

As this is the month of October, So Hactoberfest is going on. Well! Hacktoberfest 2020 is a program powered by the digital ocean in partnership with Intel and Dev to promote the open-source.

Here open source points to the open-source projects, open-source software and open-source organizations. Examples of open-source software include VLC Media Player, Mozilla Firefox, Linux, WordPress and the number tends to infinity.

If a project or software is open source, this means that its source code, documentation, and the user interface are made public and you are free to modify the code, add new features, fix bugs and redistribute it.

By the way, Digital ocean is an American organisation that helps the fellow developers to deploy their apps and websites on the cloud.

Here deploying an app or website means making it publicly available. This helps all the developers, designers and the whole team to get quality feedback and this way they can improve their app or website.

It is not like that Hacktoberfest is only for coders but if you are not a coder! don't worry, you can also participate in Hacktoberfest 2020. Like you can contribute to the UI(user interface), UX(user experience) and documentation of any open-source software.

Get Much more than a T-Shirt

To participate in Hacktoberfest, you have to make 4 valid pull requests on the repositories marked with Hacktoberfest and Hacktoberfest-accepted labels. This wins you a Free Limited edition Hacktoberfest Tshirt. You can also choose to plant a tree rather than getting a Tshirt.

This time Hactoberfest has introduced some great changes in order to stop the spammers. Spammers are the one here who are just making meaningless contributions in order to get a free T-shirt.

I really appreciate the new opt-in only method introduced by the digital ocean. Well! Hacktoberfest and open source can help you to get just more than a Tshirt like you can earn a big amount of money through open source contributions.

Earn By Contributing to Open Source

If you really want to earn from Open Source, there are numerous programs like Google Summer of Code, Outreachy and many more which give you a decent amount of money like up to $5000 for 3 months for supporting the open-source organizations.

Moreover, you will learn to collaborate with the team members on GitHub, you will learn git, you will learn how realtime Products are developed and a lot more.

So this was a kind of introduction about Hacktoberfest and open source.

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