DigitalOcean Partners with GitHub to Support Open Source Projects during Hacktoberfest October 1–31

DigitalOcean is organizing its fourth annual Hacktoberfest in partnership with GitHub. The event was created to support open source projects and participants can earn a free t-shirt by contributing four pull requests during the month of October.

More than 29,000 people signed up for Hacktoberfest 2016 from 114 countries and 10,227 people completed the challenge. The event tracked a record-breaking 92,569 total PRs opened, up from 49,000 the previous year. Participants contributed to more than 29,000 repositories, spurring progress on thousands of open source projects and making maintainers very busing during the month of October.

In preparation for the event, maintainers can add the “Hacktoberfest” label to issues in their GitHub projects that would be suitable for new contributors to work on. Participants can browse all the “Hacktoberfest” issues if they need some inspiration to get started.

Both WooCommerce and Gutenberg plugin maintainers have already started applying the “Hacktoberfest” label to issues to help WordPress developers find a good entry point for contributing.

Hacktoberfest begins Sunday, October 1, but participants can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31. All participants will receive limited-edition Hactoberfest stickers, even if you don’t complete the four pull requests. Those who complete the challenge before October 31st will be eligible to receive a shirt. Pull requests can be made in any public GitHub-hosted repository and are not limited to those with the Hacktoberfest label.

Please leave a comment on this post if you have a WordPress-related plugin, theme, or project that has a few designated Hacktoberfest issues for new contributors.