Hacktoberfest 2018 is here! It’s a chance to give back to communities you love

Hacktoberfest is back!

After awesome experiences the last few years, Mattermost is thrilled to be participating in Hacktoberfest once again. The month-long contest, which is now in its fifth year, is sponsored by DigitalOcean, GitHub and Twilio.

Hacktoberfest gives members of the open source community the opportunity to give back to the projects they love and earn bonus swag by contributing during the month of October.

This year, the first 50,000 people who submit five pull requests to any GitHub-hosted project globally will receive a free limited edition t-shirt from DigitalOcean. If it’s your first time contributing to Mattermost, you’ll also receive some swag from us.

Why should I get involved?

Giving back to the open source community is awesome.

Not only do you get to work on interesting projects and build cool things, you also get to meet incredible people.

At Mattermost, we encourage our developers to participate in Hacktoberfest. Many of them are open source evangelists and contribute to projects we use here at Mattermost, which ultimately makes their work easier.

With so many open source projects out there, it can be hard to figure out which to contribute to—particularly if it’s your first time.

If you’re struggling to figure out which project to work on, I’d recommend starting with a product you use or a community you’re already involved in.

Otherwise, look for a project that uses technologies you’re interested in and want to become more familiar with.

Mattermost uses Go and React. If you’d like to learn more about either of those languages—or you want to gain experience with React Native or Kubernetes—why not contribute to our project? Getting started is easy. Learn how to get involved here.

Last year, developers from across the world submitted 240,000 pull requests to more than 64,000 open source repositories during Hacktoberfest. That’s up from the 90,000 pull requests that were submitted in 2016.

Carlos Panato, who’s now an engineer at Mattermost, won the 2017 Mattermost Hacktoberfest Award by contributing seven pull requests, including a Do Not Disturb feature, the ability to remove users from channels via slash commands and the ability to direct message yourself.

Who will win this year’s award? It might be you.

Check out our open Hacktoberfest issues on GitHub and stop by our contributors’ community channel to get involved.

For more information, head over to DigitalOcean’s site.

Happy Hacktoberfest!