The Moonshot: Hacktoberfest Launches at Intuit
By: Rocio Montes
Tags: Community Engagement, Intuit, Open Source, Engineering, Hacktoberfest

Our amazing hacktoberfest t-shirts being modeled by the engineers at the India office

As Intuit’s Open Source Lead, I work to create tools and processes to motivate Intuit engineers across the globe to take part in open source (OS). OS is an important part of Intuit tech culture. By fostering a culture of contribution and collaboration within our engineering community, which includes technologists from 17 global sites, we help advance Intuit’s mission to power the prosperity of more than 50M consumers, self-employed and small businesses around the world with TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint and Turbo. I was relatively new to open source when I took this role and, when I started, I never imagined open source’s power of community building.

In my role, I’m always looking for ways to grow our OS involvement and community. Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of OS, seemed like a perfect fit for our tech community. During Hacktoberfest, engineers from around the globe focus on solving OS issues labeled with “hacktoberfest”. With the help of Mastermind Aliza Carpio, Intuit Technology Evangelist, and along with my colleagues in Bangalore, Naresh Ramesh, Kriti Agarwal and Anand Sudhanaboina, we set out to bring Hacktoberfest to the Intuit community.

This year, we focused on motivating our engineers to create a groundswell for Intuit OS projects like CardParts, BenTen and Keiko, as a key element of our commitment to Open Source principles and practices. We started out with labeling parties, where we asked open source maintainers to identify issues ready for contribution and tag them with “Hacktoberfest.”

Aliza Carpio’s tweets are always on point ❤

With some special incentives planned, including a popular limited-edition t-shirt, we introduced Hacktoberfest to the broader Intuit community. Word about the event spread like wild! We built on the momentum by celebrating involvement. Our top contributor, Samantha Monteiro, hosted a hacktoberfest meetup with Women of SDJS that generated 16 PRs to Intuit Open Source projects. Our top maintainer, Dave Bergschneider, split up issues into more manageable segments to give more chances to get involved. Dave’s work helped him generate 17 PRs created to the project he maintains: LD React Components. Contributions came from across Intuit sites, and the sense of excitement and community grew as people shared photos with their t-shirts. We even had non-engineers get involved, submitting PRs for text edits and translations.

The hardest part of hacktoberfest was to distribute the t-shirts across all Intuit offices 😅

What started as a small commitment to launch a Hacktoberfest program turned out to have a huge impact. Involvement and energy kept compounding; the more people got involved, the more people wanted to be involved. That’s part of what makes the open source community so amazing. We each play our own small role, but together, we can achieve things much bigger than we ever imagined.

Here’s a snapshot of our awesome results:

164 Pull Requests against Intuit Open Source projects from Intuit Engineers

against Intuit Open Source projects from Intuit Engineers 149 engineers submitted PRs to Intuit OS projects

to Intuit OS projects 23% of contributors are female engineers, higher than the OS average participation, which is 6%

higher than the OS average participation, which is 6% Top Contributed Projects: QuickBooks-V3-Java-SDK — 35 PRs, Replay Web — 22 PRs, LD-React-Components — 17 PRs

— 35 PRs, — 22 PRs, — 17 PRs For the QuickBooks-V3-Java-SDK the code coverage across 3 projects went from 33% to ~70%, especially payments-api rose from 11% to 92%

Increased star count by 1590 (vs 943 increase from last month)

(vs 943 increase from last month) On Twitter, we had 2,152 impressions and over 150 retweets and likes

Our Top Contributor: Samantha Monteiro

Contributed to Intuit OS projects

Hosted a hacktoberfest meetup with Women of SDJS that generated 16 PRs to Intuit Open Source projects

Completed the official hacktoberfest challenge by submitting 4 PRs to different OS projects

Samantha 🇧🇷 is for sure an inspiration!!

Top Maintainer: Dave Bergschneider

17 PRs created to the project he maintains, LD React Components

Most active project maintainer, even though he went on vacations during Hacktoberfest

Dave had issues for everyone!!!

Our engineers were really excited …

Intuit OS project maintainer were happy…

Many of our engineers, including myself, finished the official Hacktoberfest challenge. Kudos to the Hacktoberfest team! what a great way to get engineers involved in Open Source. I would recommend it to everyone!

All I have to say is…