Hacktoberfest 2015 by DigitalOcean

Ah, October. It's that time of year again! Last year, I celebrated October by drinking lots of excellent German beer with my friends in the popular Oktoberfest celebration in Munich. It was a great experience -- the beer was fantastic, the atmosphere in the tents was exceptional, and the girls dressed in lederhosen were lovely!

This year, I chose to celebrate October in a slightly geekier way.

Hacktoberfest 2015

Support Open Source and Get an Awesome T-Shirt

Hacktoberfest 2015, organized by DigitalOcean (the awesome super-cheap SSD cloud provider), is a month-long celebration of open source software, in partnership with GitHub.

How to Participate

Hacktoberfest is about contributing to open source software. To participate, just submit 4 pull requests to any public GitHub repository within the month of October and sign up on the Hacktoberfest event page.

Tip: A pull request is a request to modify and improve a GitHub repository, by forking the project (duplicating its current state to your own GitHub account), editing, fixing and improving its source, and finally, asking for the changes to be merged into the original repository.

Click here for a definitive guide on contributing to open source projects on GitHub.

When October is over, DigitalOcean will send you a swell-looking Hacktoberfest T-shirt!

DigitalOcean Wins

I personally think that DigitalOcean is awesome for organizing this event -- I imagine it will cost them thousands of dollars to print and mail those T-shirts, and the fact that they are doing it out of their sheer love for open source and developer collaboration is just beautiful. There's a company that wants to advance technology and make the world a better place, without any (obvious) agenda.

#Hacktoberfest on Twitter

Check out the Twitter hashtag #Hacktoberfest to see what other developers are doing to celebrate open source, and let everyone know which open source projects you contributed to!