Hacktoberfest is an annual event sponsored by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio and while "Hacktoberfest" might sound or give the impression of something doable only by very experienced hacker programmers, in essence, it's just a wrapper around having to submit 5 Pull Requests to any Github hosted repository and earn some swag in return. 

As such the aim is purely motivating people to contribute to open source rather than to run a lucrative competition.For the prize to be claimed, a limited edition t-shirt and a few stickers, you have to make five pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any timezone and to any public repo on GitHub. The chances of winning are good as this year the first 50,000 to complete all 5 PR's win.

On the other side, that of repo maintainers, in order to attract attention and direct help to specific issues, they can label such issues as “Hacktoberfest”. For example, this is how Perl.com uses this scheme:

To search for open issues you can contribute to, you can do a global, or a repository-specific search by running the following query:

is:issue is:open label:"hacktoberfest"

Then you can refine the search by programming language and other more advanced criteria, but note that not just issues tagged as #Hacktoberfest count to the challenge; any pull request made to a public repository between October 1 and  31 will count. Yet another, even better, way of finding open requests is through the dedicated Issuehub portal.

In case you're new to the world of open source, Github, repos and pull requests, fear not as there are some good guides to get you started such as the Introduction to Open Source, or How To Create a Pull Request.

The guys from Lingonsaft have even made two very useful videos to get you started, How to pull request with git and github:

and How to solve git merge conflict, on Github or with terminal

They have also posted a list of projects which are beginner friendly.

Experienced Github contributors, of course, know where and what to look for.

So, if you ever wanted to start contributing to open source but were lacking motive, maybe Hacktoberfest is the push you've been waiting for.

More Information

Hacktoberfest on DigitalOcean

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