Hacktoberfest 2022 - Get a Free T-shirt or a Tree Planted in your Name

It’s almost time for Hacktoberfest 2022. The first 40,000 participants will have the option to choose between having a tree planted in their name, or a Hacktoberfest 2022 t-shirt.

What is “Hacktoberfest”?

From the about section of Hacktoberfest:

“Hacktoberfest is DigitalOcean’s annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. Much of modern tech infrastructure—including some of DigitalOcean’s own products—relies on open-source projects built and maintained by passionate people who often don’t have the staff or budgets to do much more than keep the project alive. Hacktoberfest is all about giving back to those projects, sharpening skills, and celebrating all things open source, especially the people that make open source so special.”

It’s a fun event that happens once a year, where thousands of developers, and non-developers, contribute a massive amount of code (or non-code) to the open-source community. The event leads to growth, opportunity, and community building.

What you need to know

• Registration begins between September 26 and October 31
• Pull requests can be made in any Github or Gitlab project
• Project maintainers must accept your pull request for it to count
• Have a minimum of 4 pull/merge requests

It appears that the rules have changed a bit. Low-quality repositories are no longer accepted towards your PRs/merges. By low-quality, we mean repositories that are created which simply request you to add your name. There’s actually a report page on the Hacktoberfest website, which will be available when registration opens.

So just be aware that the organizers of this event are looking for quality contributions, so you can ignore those repositories that ask you to submit your favorite color, and focus on some meaningful repository instead. Remember, you don’t need to write code, there are no-code options.

It’s also worth mentioning that some repositories will send you additional swag for your contributions. DigitalOcean has done so in the past. The only requirement is that your PR is accepted, and merged into the codebase.

We hope you have fun this year; we will be contributing with all of you as well. Here’s to Hacktoberfest 2022.

Happy Hacking!