What Is Hacktoberfest -And Why Open Source Is The Future.

So a lot of you must be witnessing a new buzz every year in the month of October about something called Hacktoberfest and a lot of you already know what it is. To those who know about it… great go-ahead and start making some awesome pull requests but those who are not much aware of it, Don’t worry by the end of this article you will know exactly what to do…so let’s get started.

What is Open-Source ??

Before diving deep into Hacktoberfest, GitHub and pull requests there is one basic thing we need to know about and that is the open-source community.

Speaking in simple terms there are not of software/codes which are owned by a particular company/organization. We are in general allowed to use those tools to get the desired tasks done but we are not able to look into what goes in the making of those tools ie. their source code is not available for us.

We can neither see nor change to our requirement the codes of this software which makes them private to the company or the organization. An example of such software will be MS word ( taking the most commonly used example so that you can relate to it ).

On the other hand, there are Open-source software/codes available in which you can freely see the source-code and even edit the code to make the product run according to the specific needs of the specific users. An example of such software will be libre office ( A replacement for the MS office ).

Why Open-Source is the future?

With the time moving into a more and more technological era I believe soon the world of opensource will dominate over the private software as it provides the flexibility needed these days by the people to perform their tasks efficiently also it helps in keeping a product up to date with regular updates and different versions of those products getting available through the open-source community.

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event which is dedicated to celebrating the open-source community and its benefits.

What exactly is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event hosted by the digital ocean where they aim to promote open source contributions to the public and grow the much-needed developer base in the world of open source.

They ask each participant to make at least 4 valid pull-requests ( If you don’t know what is a pull request we will briefly cover that as well at the end of the article so keep reading :) ) during the time of the event ( ie. in the month of October ).

Also, there are a lot of goodies that you can grab by participating in Hacktoberfest details of which can be found on their website. Generally, first X amount of participants to submit 4 valid pull request ( the number X varies every year ) gets a goody like a T-shirt from them ( Who does not like a free swag after all ?? ).

You can check the official site to know more about Hacktoberfest and participate in it.

How to participate in Hacktoberfest?

It’s as simple as it gets. Just go to there website and click on the “START HACKING” button. It will ask you to link our GitHub account with the Hacktoberfest so that they can count the pull requests made by you.

Once you have made 4 successful pull requests you will have to wait for 7 days for it to get confirmed and that’s it, you have successfully completed the Hacktoberfest for that year, congratulation.

What are Pull-requests and how to make them?

For someone familiar with the GitHub, Pull request is a simple edit in someone’s GitHub repository by you.

If you are not much aware of GitHub, let me explain you in a bit details ( I won’t be able to cover complete details here in this article, let me know if you all want me to make a dedicated article on it ).

So here I will tell you exactly how to make a pull-request in GitHub. First of all, make your GitHub account and then follow the below mentioned simple steps.

Step-1 -> Search for a repository/code you are familiar with ( or a code developed on a language you are familiar to code in ).

Step-2 -> In that repository/code look for the changes you can make either in the documentation ( Ie. the readme file)or in the code itself which makes that repository/code a bit better in either functionality or understandability. ( Trust me it’s not as tough as it sounds )

Step-3 -> Fork that repository by clicking on the “Fork” button on the top right side of the screen. It might take a few seconds to fork.

Step-4 -> Once the repository is forked make the changes in your copy of that repository ( Yes… forking a repository provides you with a personal copy of that repository :) ).

Step-5 -> Once you have made all the changes commit those changes by clicking on the “Commit changes” button in the bottom of the page.

Step-6 -> Lastly, Go to the code section ( First option ) then click on the pull request button. Then simply add a comment regarding what changes have you made and then click on “Create Pull Request button” and with this, you are all done.

Do this 4 times for 4 different repositories to complete the HacktoberFest.

Hope this article helps you to understand about open-source, Hacktoberfest and Pull-Requests.