Hacktoberfest Starts in Six Days 🎃🎉
Tags: meta, opensource, hacktoberfest, contributorswanted
Published: 2019-09-25 14:46:16

For six years and counting, DigitalOcean has run a campaign throughout October to celebrate Open Source.  To participate, you need to make at least four legit pull requests to open source projects.  As a reward, the first 50,000 people to complete the challenge will receive a bunch of free SWAG, including a limited edition t-shirt for that year's celebration. It's called **[Hacktoberfest](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/)**.

This year, DEV is proud to be a co-presenter of the month-long event. That means when you get your prize, it will include DEV goodies like stickers. You will also get a unique Hacktoberfest badge for your DEV profile when you complete the challenge. 😄

As a co-host, we will be extra committed to boosting the event on DEV! So for the month of Hacktoberfest, we will be encouraging plenty of use of the on-site tag, and encouraging everyone to show off their projects, their contributions, and to see what types of contributions others are making.  We’re really excited to see the DEV Community participating in this global celebration of open-source.

{% tag hacktoberfest %}

## **What kind of content makes for a good Hacktoberfest post on DEV? Here are five ideas**

### 1. Make a "Contributors Wanted" post if you maintain a repo

Tag your post #hacktoberfest and #contributorswanted and link to the repo with some encouraging guidance on where to get started.

Perhaps embed your repo in for extra clarity, like so:

{% github thepracticaldev/dev.to %}

_[For stickiness, you may also want to create a listing](https://dev.to/about-listings)_

### 2. Start a general discussion, or request for ideas

Ask the community on an ongoing basis which repos might be looking for contributors.

### 3. Write a post detailing each of your pull requests

Embed the pull request and tell a story of your process for discovering the right issue that needed to be tackled and how you went about doing it.

{% github https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/pull/4075 %}

Click the `?` in the DEV editor for guidance on how to embed different types of content.

### 4. Post about any Hacktoberfest meetups

It looks like that's already begun happening on DEV...

{% link https://dev.to/cheahengsoon/hacktoberfest-2019-singapore-meetup-2me7 %}

### 5. Just have fun with it

Not every post requires a specific outcome, let's just make sure that this is an especially inclusive and wonderful month for the broader open source community...

{% link https://dev.to/realabbas/ready-for-hacktoberfest-48jf %}

## **Going forward**

- Come back to DEV every day during October for discussion and discovery. The community will be here to help.
- Look for chances to contribute to DEV itself — we will be putting in work this week to make sure the repo is extra ready come October.
- Add your [DEV icon](https://dev.to/p/badges) to your personal site alongside your other social links, so that anybody who stumbles across your website knows where to find your Hacktoberfest content.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Happy coding!