HacktoberFest 2021

To anyone interested,
also this year (for the 8th year in a row) the HacktoberFest is happening, from the 1st of October 2021 til the 31st.

What is it?

Hacktoberfest, in its 8th year, is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean. During the month of October, they invite whoever is interested to join open-source software enthusiasts, beginners, and the developer community by contributing to open-source projects.

How to participate?

If you are interested, you can do this in a variety of ways:

• Prepare and share your project for collaboration
• Contribute to the betterment of a project via pull requests
• Organize an event
• Mentor others
• Donate directly to open source projects

Where is RISC OS in this?

This year the RISC OS Community organisation on GitHub has selected and allowed a set of projects, so anyone interested can submit changes, improvements and corrections and so gain for the Hacktoberfest 2021. We’ll make sure your contribution (pull requests) will be accepted and registered for the event.

In other words you can take part to the Hacktoberfest by coding and improving things for RISC OS if you would like. I also encourage the owners of personal GitHub accounts to take part to it. Also documentation reviews count!

What can I earn?

This is mostly to support Open Source, which has become the main form of development and so many things these days relay on it, however you can earn a TShirt or choose to have tree planted somewhere as a reward.

To get a shirt, you must make four approved pull requests (PRs) on opted-in projects between October 1-31 in any time zone.

What are the rules?

Rules to partecipate:

• Pull requests can be made in any participating GitHub or GitLab hosted repository/projects. Look for the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to know if a project is participating in Hacktoberfest.

• You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31. Just be sure to sign up on the official Hacktoberfest website for your pull requests to count.

• The pull request must contain commits you made yourself.

• If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam, it will not be counted toward your participation in Hacktoberfest.

• If a maintainer reports behaviour that’s not in line with the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate.

• A pull request is considered approved once it has an overall approving review from maintainers, or has been merged by maintainers, or has been given the ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ label.

Hope someone here will decide to take part in this, it’s fun, it’s good for RISC OS, shows the rest of the world that RISC OS is still under active support and you may get a tree planted somewhere to help this planet a bit more.

Thanks everyone for reading this and best of luck to everyone who’ll decide to participate! :)

P.S. For the owners of personal accounts who want to take part to this with their own repositories, please make sure the repositories have the correct code of conduct and contribution guidelines first.

Official resources here: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/resources

To register to win your Tshirt or plant your tree click on Start Hacking and follow the instructions, select “Participant” role and good luck! :)

I added the Open Issues on the

for who is interested, check for the Hacktoberfest labeled issues, follow the instructions, do your fixes/changes, and submit your PRs and gain points!

And we have the first Hacktoberfest accepted PR! :)

https://github.com/RISC-OS-Community/mUnit/pull/7

Also, quick reminder for everyone interested, there are more Issues opened for Hacktoberfest, find them and have fun. There are issues for everyone (included people inclined to make videos on youtube etc.), if you have any specific request that we haven’t covered please let me know!

As always good luck to everyone who will join the fun!

I saw a lot of activity on GitHub during October. Was this a success, partially or wholly?

Dear Andreas,
considering I was expecting nothing or maybe just 1 view lol I would say it was extremely successful :)

We had multiple commits, which allowed people to gain points and win their T-Shirt or (hopefully) get a new tree planted to help our beautiful planet.

Each repository has seen hundreds and hundreds of views, I don’t know how to post a picture on here, but only in the last 2/3 weeks only WakeOnLAN has done more than 300 views and many many check outs.

We had many clones and the pre-built software also had quite a few downloads too.

So, I guess, it helped spreading a bit the fun to do something on RISC OS and also outside the community of traditional users/developers.

We also had a grown in the number of members which is great, but I do not know how much of this is due to hacktoberfest.

So, definitely Hacktoberfest will be back next year. Also, with more repositories being added people will have more choice and so it should be even better than this year, hopefully.

I am planning to organise more contests ( if there will be time ) for 2022. I contests match beautifully the message of “having fun with RISC OS”.

Thanks everyone who check it out and helped, hope people had fun! :)

P.S. For next year there will be also commits available in BBC BASIC, RiscLua and Python :)

Well, for myself, I can say it was a success.

It gave me the prompt to contribute something back to the RISC OS community.

Looking forward to continuing.