Ever heard about Hacktoberfest? No, it's not about beer, and no it's not in Germany. I will give you a hint: it's about Open Source, learning, code and you don't need to be a developer to start hacking! Anyone is welcome!

So Hacktoberfest is the DigitalOcean's annual event to bring people together and contribute to open source projects; the prize to win is a nice t-shirt or plant a tree in DigitalOcean forest. It was launched 9 years ago, in 2013 and had only 700 participants. Last year had more than 141,000 participants!

The rules are simple:

• Register anytime between September 26 and October 31 on Hacktoberfest website

• Pull requests can be made in any GitHub or GitLab repo that's participating in Hacktoberfest (it must have the "hacktoberfest" topic)

• Project maintainers must accept your pull/merge requests for them to count toward your total

• Have 4 pull/merge requests accepted between October 1 and October 31 to complete Hacktoberfest

• The first 40,000 participants (maintainers and contributors) who complete Hacktoberfest can elect to receive one of two prizes: a tree planted in their name or the Hacktoberfest 2022 t-shirt.

Did I intrigue you already? No? Then here there are some excellent reasons you should consider participating:

• Help the open-source community!

  How many tools and libraries do we use in our daily work? They are great; we love them, and they make our life easier. Still, you should know that behind these tools, there are developers that are not paid for maintaining them. They do this in their free time, so Hacktoberfest is the perfect time to thank them and contribute!

• You can learn so much

  Digging into a library's code is one of my favourite hobbies. You can learn so much about the language and the patterns because they use advanced techniques you don't usually think about. If you use these tools every day, you are already familiar with them, so they are not strangers, so don't be afraid to check what is happening under the hood!

  Soon you will realise that your code style changes, for the better (hopefully) 😅

• Open source can help you advance in your career

  Well, in these sad times, it's a good point to consider... Check out this story

• But I'm not a developer... I have no idea how to code...

  Hacktoberfest is for anyone! There is a lot of documentation and materials that need a hand. What about that documentation took you ages to understand? Could it be written better?

• It's Friday Time*

  We are lucky enough to work in a company that gives us time to learn and improve our skills. We have no more excuses...

Not sure where to start? Here are some suggestions for you; I'm sure you have already heard of some of these tools!

• strawberry-graphql
• pytest
• pylint
• Stoybook
• Grafana
• LocalStack
• Ansible
• git itself!
• typescript-cheatsheets/react This is an excellent repo to check when you mess up with Typescript!
• excalidraw it's a really nice website for sketching hand-drawn diagrams, have a look. I'm sure you will love it! You can also share your libraries in this repo!
• Fancy learning something new? Check out TheAlgorithms/Python repo!

The list is very long and can't fit in an article; check awesome-for-beginners repo for a more complete list or go to the official GitHub topic page!

Pro tip: you can filter by language and filter the results in the upper left search bar!

Happy Hacking! 👋

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(*) At Made.com, every two weeks on Friday, we can work on what we like, a project or improve our skillset, anything that benefits Made.com or the development community.