/hacktobherfest

Our annual Hacktoberfest event

HacktobHERfest

SheCodesOKC is hosting our annual HacktobHERfest event again in 2023! This meeting is in honor of participating in the popular event, Hacktoberfest.

Table of Contents

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is DigitalOcean's annual event that's used to encourage people to contribute to open-source throughout the month of October. Most modern tech infrastructure relies on open-source projects, which are built and maintained by passionate people who don't have the staff or budget to do more than keep the project alive. Hacktoberfest is about giving back to those projects, sharpening skills, and celebrating all things related to open-source, including the people that make it so special.

Thousands of coders and non-coders have participated in this event to support the projects they've used and loved, to learn and practice skills to enhance their careers, and to meet new people who love open-source as much as they do.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Hacktoberfest, and they’re calling for your support! Whether it’s your first time participating—or your tenth—it’s time to hack out four pristine pull/merge requests as we continue our month of support for open source.

For more information about Hacktoberfest, check out their website at https://hacktoberfest.com/.

What makes HacktobHERfest different?

HacktobHERfest is an event for women/non-binary to provide support in creating the 4 pull requests needed to complete Hacktoberfest and plant a tree through Tree Nation!

Don't worry if you don't have much (or any!) GitHub experience, our organizers are here to help.

You can sign up for Github (https://github.com/) or Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/) ahead of time, or if you have questions you can ask any of our hosts.

When is it?

Join us on October 15, 2023 from 1300-1500 CDT at Tailwind in Oklahoma City. Details to RSVP are here.

Tailwind is located at 111 Harrison Ave. Suite 104, Oklahoma City, OK 73104. Harrison Ave likely will have available street parking, or you can park in one of Jimmy Joh 's two parking lots (one on the west side of the building and one on the east side). There's also a black paved parking lot south of the building.

Besides being a fun opportunity to socialize, organizers will be on hand to help you work toward your four Hacktoberfest PRs. This is a great opportunity for first-time contributors to ask about and get assistance with GitHub, pull requests, and other questions! Several members also will speak about or demonstrate their PRs. If you create a pull request during the meetup, you're welcome to show it off, too!

Feel free to sign up for GitHub and Hacktoberfest beforehand. We can help you out with these steps at the event, too.

We hope to see you there!

Finding ways to contribute

There are several ways to find opportunities to participate in Hacktoberfest by working on projects and issues suited to first-time pull requests.

  • From your GitHub dashboard, type hacktoberfest into the search bar. By default, this will bring up a list of repositories tagged as participating. It's very likely that the top results will be for beginner-friendly projects!

    • Click on an interesting project and see its README for instructions about how to contribute to it.

  • Or, search within the Hacktoberfest topic, where you can filter by language.

    • If you star this topic, it will appear on your Explore page for quicker access!

  • If you'd rather search for particular issues to address rather than projects, type good first issue AND hacktoberfest into the search bar and switch the results to filter by Issues rather than Repositories.

  • Combine these tips on GitHub's Advanced Search page! From here, you can search for open issues only and issues with certain labels, filter by language, search for repos with many stars, etc.

  • Check out the Techlahoma Slack (register if needed) to see community members' suggestions! Here are some of our recommendations with beginner-friendly open issues. (Note that approved pull requests may need to be tagged hacktoberfest-accepted by a maintainer to count toward your progress.)

What's a pull request?

A pull request is a way for developers to contribute to open source projects. The name "pull request" refers to a request from you, as a developer, to the site maintainers for your edits to be merged into the existing code.

If you have never completed a pull request before, Cassie Koelsh with SheCodesOKC has published a useful tutorial.
GitHub Pull Requests with Cassie Koelsch - SheCodesOKC