The fifth-annual Hacktoberfest, the month-long occasion that encourages folks all over the world to contribute to open supply initiatives throughout October, was an incredible success.
During October 2018, 46,088 individuals accomplished the Hacktoberfest problem: making no less than 5 pull requests (PR) to any public repository on GitHub. This is a 44% enhance over 2017 participation ranges, though this yr’s occasion required 5 pull requests as an alternative of the earlier 4. Everyone who completes the problem is rewarded with a free, limited-edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt.
Hacktoberfest confirmed its world attain—individuals hailed from 143 international locations (based mostly on their delivery deal with). Additionally, 267 community-organized Hacktoberfest occasions (a 124% enhance over 2017) had been held in 50 totally different international locations.
Participants opened 412,324 PRs to 106,582 repositories, a rise of 71% and 66%, respectively, over 2017. They accounted for roughly 25% of all PRs opened on GitHub in October.
Because PRs do not should be labeled in any means, it is troublesome to inform what sorts of contributions had been made; nonetheless, of the 7,442 pull requests labeled “Hacktoberfest,” roughly 27% had been JavaScript, 17% had been Python, and 16% had been HTML. And 90% of these PRs had been closed.
Growing sponsorship
The occasion’s development was evident even earlier than it started when Twilio joined DigitalOcean and GitHub as a sponsor. Twilio is “widely recognized for their work shepherding developer communities,” says Daniel Zaltsman, developer relations supervisor at DigitalOcean. “Having Twilio on board gave us the promotional reach and the funds to expand the program to the numbers we see today.”
Microsoft also participated by providing its personal T-shirt giveaway for anybody who submitted a PR to a Microsoft open supply repository. Since Microsoft’s open supply repos are hosted on GitHub, these PRs additionally counted towards the 5 PRs required to finish the Hacktoberfest problem.
Hacktoberfest promotes not simply contributions, however group. A participant at an occasion in India informed Digital Ocean: “This year’s Hacktoberfest was a blast! We got lots of our college mates to learn how to use Git and make a pull request. We organized a successful Hacktoberfest event in our college with over 100 people participating and more than half of them ending up making a pull request, most of them being freshman.”
Hacktoberfest “is about creating an inclusive community that builds together to make the world a better place,” Zaltsman wrote on the DigitalOcean blog. “What happened during Hacktoberfest will have a lasting impact on people long after October 2018. This is why quality is preferred to quantity and why we’ll continue to improve the program to support this core value.”
One of the enhancements the staff is engaged on for 2019 is decreasing invalid pull requests, which accounted for about three% of this yr’s contributions. But Zaltsman says the customized t-shirt rewards will stay part of Hacktoberfest in 2019 and past.
