Contribute to Open Source during Hacktoberfest 2021

Ferdinand Boas -

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is an annual event that runs over October. Instead of celebrating the Bavarian culture (and sometimes drinking too many beers), this event aims at supporting the open source community.

2021 marks the eighth anniversary of the event launched by DigitalOcean. Over the years, Hacktoberfest has had a seminal role: it has given enough confidence to many developers to become a part of the open-source community. In 2020, around 170,000 developers participated in Hacktoberfest.

Why should you participate?

There are many different reasons why you should contribute to open source. But Hacktoberfest is about joining the community in a mutual effort to drive the growth of open source.

Your contributions are very valuable to any open-source project. Some of our most used tools were born outside the Meilisearch team, and we could not be grateful enough for the efforts of our open-source contributors.

And if you need an extra push, both DigitalOcean and Meilisearch are sending gifts to the contributors.
DigitalOcean is going to give a T-shirt and a swag pack to the first 55,000 participants of Hacktoberfest.
Meilisearch will send reusable insulated water bottles to all those who successfully participated in Hacktoberfest and contributed to the open-source projects of Meilisearch (look for the repositories with the hacktoberfest topic).

We are also setting shared goals that all Meilisearch contributors can help to reach. These goals will unlock perks that will benefit everyone.
We still have to define those perks and will update this blog post accordingly. Some of our ideas so far:

  • financial support to other open-source projects
  • supporting organizations with an environmental impact (like restoration of forests or ocean cleaning)
  • sponsoring organizations promoting diversity in software (like Black Girls Code).

We would be happy to hear your ideas!

What happened last year at Meilisearch?

Last year, Meilisearch took part in Hacktoberfest for the first time. We encouraged contributions to the core Meilisearch repository and to most of the tools we maintain: API wrappers, framework plugins, SDKs...

Started from the bottom...

It was a real success: we merged over fifty contributors’ pull requests. It was twice more than in September 2020.

This year at Meilisearch

With around thirty pull requests from external contributors merged in September 2021, we expect more contributions at this year’s Hacktoberfest.

... now we're here.

We’ve made more repositories available for Hacktoberfest:

How can we help you?

Contributing for the first time to an open-source project can be intimidating. That’s why we are happy to guide you step by step through this process. We have several good first issues that can help you get started.

Feel free to ask any questions on the GitHub issues of the corresponding repository, GitHub Discussions, or on our Slack workspace (the #hacktoberfest channel is the place to go, but you can also send direct messages to the Meilisearch team members).

We can’t wait to see your next commits 🚀