Hacktoberfest 2020

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October has started, which means: Hacktoberfest!

Hacktoberfest is a worldwide, month-long celebration of open source. An event open to everyone. Whether you’re a developer, student learning to code, documenter, designer, you can help drive the growth of open source projects, like Home Assistant.

By participating in Hacktoberfest, and by contributing four GitHub pull requests, you will earn either a free t-shirt or, new this year, have a tree planted. All backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge.

Just like all other years, Home Assistant participates in Hacktoberfest.

What to work on?

So, you’ve decided to earn yourself that free Hacktoberfest t-shirt? Great! We’ve collected a bunch of tasks/suggestions/bugs that we’d love to get some help on. You can find those by filtering/searching for issues with the hacktoberfest label.

Or view all our Hacktoberfest issues across all Home Assistant projects.

Additionally, we recently held the month of “What the heck?!”. During this month a lot of suggestions and annoyances got reported by our community. While, those topic may not be approved as a change yet, it might be a great source of inspiration to contribute something the community wants. Check out the WTH community forum posts.

But, I’m not a developer?!

If you are not a developer, new to git, GitHub or open source in general, documentation can be a great way to get started. A relatively easy way to contribute, is by reviewing the documentation of integrations you use or are familiar with, checking if everything is still up to date and if free of spelling/grammar mistakes.

Every single documentation page on our website has a “Edit this page on GitHub”, on the top right corner. Using that link, you can change the text on that page and provide a suggestion for improvement.

On our Community forum, there is a good, step-by-step, guide on how this works: Editing the Documentation and Creating a Pull Request on GitHub.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign-up on the Hacktoberfest website and start hacking! If you have any questions, please, drop by on our Discord chat server. We have dedicated developer channels and are happy to assist you.

Happy Hacktoberfest 🎉

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-2020/
2 Likes
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What is Home Assistant core team current opinion about Hacktoberfest maintainer negative aspect in the form of small commit “spam”? Do you feel that Hacktoberfest positive effects outweigh small commits that some might see as spam?

Personally, I believe that Hacktoberfest is a good concept because it helps introduce new people to contributing to open source projects, even if starting out might only be spell correction of documentation, but clearly many open source developers feel very differently about Hacktoberfest. Read:

The question was raised in this blog post from WHATWG maintainer who posted their feelings about Hacktoberfest caused “spam” and arguing that its positive effects does not outweigh all the “spam” which can cause too much unnecessary strain on maintainers:

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DigitalOcean has acknowledged the problem’s existence and responded as follows:

UPDATED: An update on efforts to reduce spam with Hacktoberfest: introducing maintainer opt-in and more.

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I think rules and steps for Home Assistant Hacktoberfest participation are not pretty clear.

I made more than four Pull Request in Home Assistant repos, but these Pull Request needs to be merged? How I can contact the HA Team to ask for the t-shirt/tree?

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The rules are pretty clear from digital ocean.
PRs count if:
Submitted during the month of October AND
Submitted in a public repo AND (
The PR is labelled as hacktoberfest-accepted by a maintainer OR
Submitted in a repo with the hacktoberfest topic AND (
The PR is merged OR
The PR has been approved
)
)
They will be merged when they have been reviewed, there are 277 outstanding ones just in the main repo. Just need to be patient.

Also HA doesn’t give you the tree/tshirt, digital ocean does

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Sorry. I didn’t want to sound rude.

This is my third year of Hacktoberfest, I have Pull Request for other projects to spare, but I thought HA provided a swag other than Digital Ocean. A misunderstanding on my part.