Join Us For Hacktoberfest 2021
Another year, another Hacktoberfest; this year marks the 8th anniversary of Digital Ocean’s world-famous autumnal event. Hacktoberfest is a wonderful opportunity to bring all open source developers together, from newcomers to seasoned veterans, and we’re making Hacktoberfest 2021 our biggest event ever, with the most opportunities we’ve ever had to get involved in our community.
With those opportunities come great swag! We’re supporting the effort by offering limited edition Mattermost stickers to everyone who makes one or more contributions to the Mattermost community during Hacktoberfest. Additionally, we’ll select top contributors in each participation category to receive a custom Mattermost mechanical keyboard. We’re also including our community in a new effort to provide financial support to the open source communities we rely on the most.
Whether you write code or not, there’s something for everyone this year. Keep reading to find out more about the ways to get involved.
Translate Mattermost
Mattermost has been translated to dozens of languages, all thanks to our fantastic community of translators across the planet. No matter what languages you speak, there are opportunities to get involved in translating the Mattermost UI. In particular, we need help with Italian, Korean, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Hindi translations, but any language listed as a work in progress is a great place to get involved.
Help Focalboard Get Ready for Primetime
Focalboard has achieved enormous growth over the last year, and we’re working hard to make it a more seamless component of the Mattermost experience. We’ve iterated very quickly on Focalboard to make its features more competitive with existing task management solutions. Today, we’ve reached a point where we can use help to write unit tests that improve Focalboard reliability.
This challenge is ideal for anyone who wants to expand their Go programming skills and get more familiar with a rapidly-growing code base. This challenge is also suitable for anyone new to the Mattermost community and wants to get more familiar with our code before jumping into more significant contributions.
Learn more about contributing to Focalboard.
Show Off Your Best Mattermost App
Mattermost Apps are lightweight, interactive add-ons that can be written in any language and run on any HTTP-compatible hosting service. Apps make it extremely easy to read or post messages, change the user interface, create interactive models, and modify just about everything else in the Mattermost experience.
We want to see your best Mattermost Apps and to get feedback about your experience building them. Create a new, unique App during October, and submit it as your Hacktoberfest contribution.
Submissions will be reviewed by our team and ranked according to two simple criteria:
- The ability to demonstrate a solution to an important uses case or common problem. Use images, gifs, and videos to show off your App.
- Clear documentation that shows how to install, configure, and use your App; this is the only way we can fully evaluate your contribution. We recommend following the Standard Readme Format.
Learn more about building Mattermost Apps; once you’re ready to submit your app, fill out this form.
Community Writing Program
We’re launching a new program for developers worldwide to get paid to write content about modern software development tools, services, and technologies. Share software development productivity hacks, write about your favorite app development framework, tell stories about building and deploying modern software, or share any other unique insight you have about technology. We’ll pay you to publish it on our blog.
Contribute to the community writing program.
QA Testing
Work closely with experts from our Quality Assurance (QA) team to test new Mattermost. You’ll spend time installing and running the latest builds of Mattermost and making sure everything works as expected. This is an excellent opportunity for non-developers to participate in a software development project and get credit for participating in Hacktoberfest.
Other Ways to Get Involved
Our Hacktoberfest handbook page has all the details about every possible way to get involved with us.
Issues labeled Good First Issue are great for newcomers; make sure you follow our contribution guidelines. Any issues labeled Help Wanted are also up for grabs. However, some of them may require fairly deep technical familiarity. We’re here to help you along the way; reach out to our maintainers early in GitHub and our community chat server to ask questions and get guidance.
Where to Get Help During Hacktoberfest
Here are resources to help guide you through every step of this Hacktoberfest:
- Handbook: Hacktoberfest 2021 – The event’s handbook page has all the details you need to start participating.
- Community Server – Join the Hacktoberfest 2021 channel on our Mattermost community server to connect with our community.
- Get Help Guide – This guide provides details about all the places you can connect with our community to get help with anything related to Mattermost.
Sign Up For Our Community Newsletter
If nothing in this post speaks to you, there will be plenty more opportunities to get involved with the Mattermost community in the future. If you’d like to receive updates about future opportunities, sign up for our community newsletter, and we’ll keep you in the loop. As an added benefit, we’ll also donate money to open source projects on your behalf.
