We Are Mobile First
The news is out! We Are Mobile First will be hosting an event to celebrate Hacktoberfest 2018 in Barcelona.
According to their website:
“Hacktoberfest — brought to you by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio — is a month-long celebration of open source software”.
The annual event started five years ago and its main goal is to make the open source world accessible and more well-known to developers that have yet to participate.
“Maintainers are invited to guide would-be contributors towards issues that will help move the project forward, and contributors get the opportunity to give back to both projects they like, and ones they’ve just discovered. No contribution is too small—bug fixes and documentation updates are valid ways of participating”.
Sounds pretty fun, huh?!
Besides enriching your personal and professional life, you will also win a limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt!
In order to win, you must open up five pull requests between October 1 and October 31.
Pull requests don’t have to be merged and accepted; as long as they’ve been opened between the very start of October 1 and the very end of October 31, they count towards your limited edition t-shirt.
Please note: Pull requests help you to inform others about changes you’ve pushed to a GitHub repository. Once a pull request is sent, interested parties can review the set of changes, discuss potential modifications, and even push follow-up commits if necessary.
Science and the open source community, in my opinion, uphold a similar set of principles. If scientific methods were kept secret, we would only be privy to the results without ever having the ability to verify them or to contribute to the scientific process with new proposals.
The open source community offers us, as developers, a chance to share our code and to improve our skills with the help of contributions. Everyone uses libraries that are open and maintained by contributors so it’s important to give something back. Moreover, community support is extremely important when it comes to developing better code and sharing constructive feedback and ideas.
The Hacktoberfest event highlights the importance of contributions and gives you a warm introduction to the global community. The experience also looks pretty good on your CV!
I participated in last year’s edition of the Hacktoberfest and I came away with my very own limited edition t-shirt and stickers! It was my first real contribution to the open source community, despite using different libraries within my own projects over the years.
When my first pull request was merged, I felt a great sense of achievement. It’s incredibly rewarding to feel as if you’ve contributed to helpful repositories that you and many other developers across the world are then likely to use.
Fast forward to the present day and I’ve made several contributions throughout the year and I’ve learned a great deal about working with different developers and dealing with code issues in the process! Participating in Hacktoberfest also helped me to build upon a lot of interpersonal skills, including how to work more effectively within a group environment. These are skills that I would then go on to use as a team member here at We Are Mobile First.
For instance, we’re big supporters of Git-Flow. It’s an incredibly useful technique that helps you to manage larger projects and it’s used by a lot of libraries. I learned a lot about it whilst making contributions as it’s important to know what branch you have to refer to and where you have to direct your pull request.
As We Are Mobile First developers, we recently decided to share some of our own frameworks online. We felt, as a result, greatly encouraged to dedicate more time towards the open source community during work hours.
If you participate in the Hacktoberfest event, you won’t be left in the dark. You can easily find repositories that support the event by looking for issues on the GitHubwebsite under the #Hacktoberfest label. The developers that maintain the framework will give you all the answers you need when it comes to explaining how you can best contribute and how the process actually works.
Firstly, you need to sign into your GitHub account on the Hacktoberfest website. If you haven’t created an account yet, you can do so here.
Then, during the month of October, keep an eye on the GitHub website for issues opened with the label #Hacktoberfest. All you need to do then is look out for any library issues written in your programming language of choice!
There are issues with different levels of difficulty so you can easily choose the ones that are more appropriate for you. Once you’ve found one that resonates, select the issue and check whether or not someone has already been assigned to it. If no one has been assigned to it, ask in the comments section for it to be assigned to you.
Remember to always read the README document and the library contribution rules before beginning. They will give you the steps you need to follow in order to do your first pull requests correctly.
We’ll be hosting our inaugural Hacktoberfest event on the 10th October at WAMF HQ: Carrer de Sant Joan de Malta, 145, Barcelona. We Are Mobile First will happily help you subscribe to and participate in this event – guiding you through all of the necessary steps to help you win your first (but hopefully not your last) limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt!
The event will take place from 6:30pm – 8:30pm. There will be beer and pizza, aka all of the essentials! Bring your laptop along so we can help you celebrate your first open source contribution.
If you’d like to get involved, register for your free ticket via Eventbrite. We’d love for you to join us! Be sure to tell your Barcelona-based friends!
Drop us a tweet to let us know you’re coming and feel free to ask us any event-related questions over there too!
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For more general information, head to the Hacktoberfest 2018 website.
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(Hero image credit: Hacktoberfest 2018)