Every year in October, Digital Ocean and GitHub team up for an online event which celebrates open-source. Open-Source is one of the most growing areas in development these years. Also, it has made possible for beginners to grow and develop their skills as a programmer/developer. On a brighter side, you get some really cool freebies as well! Let’s talk in detail about this event.

Hacktoberfest is on online open-source contribution event, the event has some maintainers, who are the companies who have their open-source project repos on GitHub. Hacktoberfest is essentially a start for the newbies who are just into coding. Here’s how you can participate in Hacktoberfest –
First and foremost, you need to register for Hacktoberfest, for that you need a GitHub account, if you don’t have one, chill we’ve got you covered. Go to this link and create an account for free!
Once your GitHub account is created, you can register for Hacktoberfest here! After registering for Hacktoberfest, you are officially a participant of Hacktoberfest! Now, you just need to start contributing to any projects out there on GitHub.

Here’s how –
First, learn about GitHub and pull requests if you don’t know about them. There are ton of free material about it on the internet.
Once, you have learned about pull request and GitHub, you need to make 5 pull requests to any 5 open-source projects. But a word of caution, your pull requests should only have commits by you, also, pull requests reported as spam would not be eligible.
After you make your pull requests, contribute by finding bugs and remove them and finally pushing them in the repository. Also, you can check your progress on the Hacktoberfest website!
The event takes in all contributions to any repository on GitHub, also, Hacktoberfest contributions count in your GSoC application! So, make sure that you choose your project for the company you want to apply for GSoC!
The event is a great opportunity to grow as a developer and improve your skills, also if you make 5 successful pull requests you are eligible to get a really cool T-Shirt by mail. Even if you aren’t able to successfully do 5 pull requests till 31st October, you are still eligible for some stickers and other cool stuff!
If you have any questions, do let us know in the comment section below!