As the ‘original’ Oktoberfest on the Wiesn in Munich officially ended last weekend, another large-scale event had already kicked off online: Hacktoberfest. Where the original event in Bavaria focuses on traditional costumes and drinking from surprisingly large glasses of beer, Hacktoberfest is all about celebrating open-source software. Last year, nearly 100,000 people from all over the world participated in the event. At Syde – originally a German agency, after all – we are known to appreciate a glass of beer. But this month, our agency is joining the party happening in the open-source community, with over a dozen Syders participating in Hacktoberfest!
Celebrating open source
Syde believes in the power of open-source software and the communities around them, connecting people around the idea that collectively, we can create amazing solutions to benefit everyone. As a WordPress agency, Syde relies on open source for all our solutions, so we are committed to contributing to open-source projects and making our solutions publicly available whenever possible. Joining Hacktoberfest is a fun way to remind ourselves of this commitment, dedicate time to projects we care about, and invite others to contribute to some of Syde’s libraries.
Every year in October, Hacktoberfest challenges participants to make 4 contributions to open-source repositories on GitHub and GitLab, two important platforms for open-source collaboration. Contribution happens through so-called “pull requests” (PRs, also called “merge requests,” MRs). Pull requests are a key part of the ‘git’ collaboration process. When you create a PR, you are basically saying, “Hi! I prepared a new version of this software package, which solves problem X by updating this part of the code! Can you have a look and, if you agree that this is a good solution, merge these changes into the software?”
This collaborative process is the foundation of how open-source software works, how bugs are fixed, and features are introduced. Participating in this process requires that you understand the basics of git and know how to create a PR. If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is! To lower the barrier of entry for newcomers, the Hacktoberfest website provides great resources for beginners.
How is Syde participating in Hacktoberfest?
Empowering colleagues to make their first open-source contributions is also an important aspect for us at Syde. This year, experienced Syde engineers will be actively supporting colleagues who are first-time contributors. They will also onboard some of our non-developers (👋 Corey!) to GitHub, where Syde’s public repositories are maintained. It is important to note that not every contribution requires coding skills: there are heaps of open-source projects where documentation or translations need to be updated, or other non-code work is waiting to be picked up by a volunteer.
As some Syders participating in the event have found out in the past week, finding a project to work on is not as easy as it seems: to have PRs count for your Hacktoberfest ‘score’, they need to be made in projects that actively participate in the event. This is because Hacktoberfest’s tallying system needs a way to identify the contributions. This means that contributions made to some of the key WordPress repositories, for example, do not ‘count’, because they do not participate in the event.
Meet some of the projects that Syders are working on
Luckily, there are plenty of projects that do participate in the event, so as inspiration, here are some projects that Syders are working on this month:
- WP-CLI, the official command-line tool for WordPress
- Distributor, a WordPress plugin for post distribution within multisites by our colleagues at 10up
- Antispam Bee, a widely used plugin to prevent spam comments maintained by the Plugin Kollektiv
These are just a few projects for which Syders have submitted their PR’s already – we’ll share a longer list after this month! For a complete overview, check the following links for each Git platform:
Can I also contribute to Syde’s projects this month?
We have opened up several of our open-source for Hacktoberfest contributions, too. Here are a few examples:
- Modularity, a key building block for our enterprise solutions
- Wonolog, our WordPress logging solution that makes use of the popular PHP library Monolog (another project participating in Hacktoberfest)
- Google Tag Manager, a Syde plugin to include GTM on your website and programmatically add data to the data layer
Using GitHub search, you can find all the participating open-source packages maintained by Syde. Maybe some of these are useful for you, and if you are participating in Hacktoberfest this month, we look forward to your contributions.
If you’re interested in our open-source contributions, keep an eye on our blog – we plan to share our experiences after the event. If you’re interested in participating in Hacktoberfest and/or have any questions about contributing or our packages, let us know in the comments!
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