Hacktoberfest is back

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Hacktoberfest is an annual event taking place during the month of October, is organized by DigitalOcean, and asks people to make a small number of contributions to selected projects on Github.

During the first years they would give out a t-shirt to those qualifying. As expected, some people would game the system and make trivial contributions. Those trivial contributions would waste time of the maintainers and be a great nuisance. Then, they removed the t-shirts and opted only to give out some fancy Github icon that you can show on that site.

However, this year they bring back the t-shirts to those first 10000 contributors. This is for those that make 6 contributions that eventually get accepted.

Is there interest from people to make such six PRs (Pull Request)?

This post is to gauge the interest of contributors and then @stgraber may decide whether to actual apply for it.

Usually there’s a list of Easy tasks that people may pick from. Github has a tag called Easy, therefore here are some tasks for a start (Github Issues with the Easy tag).

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Our repositories typically have the needed tag to handle hacktoberfest contributions, though we’re not particularly high on Easy issues these days.

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Is it out of a desire not to exceed the psychological 50-issue cap, or we just don’t have any grunt work / simple stuff to do?

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A mix of both :slight_smile:

I like keeping the issue count below 50 as that’s about as many issues as I can remember in my head, I’ve noticed that once we get above that it quickly grows out of control so I will usually go and fix a bunch of stuff whenever I see the count growing a bit high.

But I also don’t have too many ideas for easy/repetitive tasks that would be a good fit for Hacktoberfest right now. We have some generic stuff like fixing golangci-lint stuff. We fixed a bunch of packages but there are a bunch more to go.

We also have more configs that should be moved to gendoc and some DB logic to move to the database generator logic. The problem with all of those (maybe with the exception of gendoc) is that they are a massive pain to review, often taking me significantly longer to check and tweak than the effort that was put into making the PR…

Anyway, we still got a few weeks to add some stuff and unlike with the University of Texas student groups, Hacktoberfest applies to all good PRs, not just those that happen to have an issue open.