Hacktoberfest 2022

Mon, Oct 03, 2022 · David Tippett, Nate Boot, Kris Freedain

Hacktoberfest Logo

Happy Hacktoberfest everyone! Wait…you don’t know what Hacktoberfest is? Well my friend, Hacktoberfest is an event that happens every October to promote contributions to open-source projects. It is a way to celebrate the work of open-source maintainers and contributors and make it easier for new developers to get involved with open-source projects.

For more information you can check out GitHub and DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest page. They have some pretty neat incentives for beginning your open-source journey! In addition to what they’ve got going on, we are offering incentives of our own for contributing that we will talk about a little later.

What does it mean to “contribute” to open-source projects?

Well, contributing can mean a lot of different things. We need people using an open-source project to report any bugs that they find so that the project can run smoother. Once those bugs are reported, we need the community’s help to fix them. To get people using the project, we also need good documentation, “how-to” blogs, and even videos. Even more so, we need help answering questions on the project’s forum. Many people have questions—you may know the answer!

To sum it up, here are a few of the ways that people can contribute to an open-source project:

  • Code
    • Bug fixes
    • Tests
    • Features
    • Code examples
  • Non-code
    • Documentation
    • Feature requests
    • Bug reports
    • Blogs
    • Tutorials
    • Answers on the forum

That sounds nice, but how do I know what to contribute?

I am so glad you asked! For contributions, I recommend you start small. OpenSearch has a list of issues marked “good first issue” that are a great place to start. Check out the query below to see some of our good first issues.

Finding Good First Issues

Once you have found an issue you would like to work on, you should check out their CONTRIBUTING.md file. It will take you through the process of contributing to that particular repo. Also, if you are contributing to a particular issue, it is helpful to comment on it to let others know you are working on it.

Generally, the process for contributing involves forking the repository, making your edit (don’t forget to sign your commits using -s in your commit message: git commit -s -m "<your commit message>"), and then submitting a pull request (PR). This guide goes into much more detail: First Contribution Guide.

If you have questions along the way, you can always @ mention one of the maintainers on the issue. You can find the maintainers in the MAINTAINERS.md file for that repo. Please be patient as the maintainers may take several days to reply depending on their capacity. If more than a few days goes by without a response, feel free to reach out to another maintainer.

Neat! Now what about those incentives you were mentioning earlier?

Okay, okay, here we go: In addition to your PRs counting towards your completion of Hacktoberfest, we are running the following leader board! This is to thank all of our fantastic contributors for the work that they do in supporting our open-source project.

For the top 5 points scorers on the leader board we have a swag pack that will include a water bottle, sweatshirt, and a sticker pack. All other contributors will be eligible for a free OpenSearch sticker! To get points for your contribution you must open an issue on GitHub and it must be tagged Hacktoberfest with the exception of the forum answers. These issues must be submitted before October 31, 2022 23:59 UTC +0. They must also be marked hacktoberfest-approved by the maintainers.

To get credit for off platform blogs submit a link to your blog in an issue on the opensearch-project/project-website repo. Ask for it to be tagged Hacktoberfest and then if it is acceptable as determined by the maintainers it will be tagged hacktoberfest-approved and will count to your credit.

Leaderboard

We are looking forward to all your contributions! Happy Hacktoberfest and make sure to follow our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube pages for live streams and other Hacktoberfest related content! Also, if you have ANY questions feel free to open a thread in our Hacktoberfest 2022 topic on the forum. Happy Hacking!