October 1st is the start of Hacktoberfest, a month-long event where people are encouraged to get involved in open-source with the promise of a T-Shirt (or you can opt for a tree to be planted in your name).
This year the goal is to provide 4 changes to open-source repositories. These can be 4 changes to a single repository or to a variety. All you have to do is look for repositories with the Hacktoberfest tag and make a change and submit it as a pull request. Some repositories may already have issues labelled Hacktoberfest, to indicate they would be good for a first-time contributor to tackle.
Amlen is taking part, it’s a large application written in C which might not be everyone’s first choice when it comes to venturing into open-source. Fortunately, it has an operator currently in alpha testing which will provide an easier entry point.
There are two issues labelled Hacktoberfest for the operator to give some ideas, plus a third to fix a bug in the jenkins build. Or if you are feeling brave there are a couple of issues with the operator whose descriptions are a little more terse.
If you don’t want to be restrained by the issues already opened, then experiment with the operator and I’m sure you will find plenty of things to improve, even if it is just helping by adding some documentation.
To get started register at https://hacktoberfest.com/ then head over to the Amlen repository and get stuck in with the Hacktoberfest issues or just play around.
Any problems/comments or just fancy a chat about Hacktoberfest then head over to the Amlen slack channel.
Happy hacking!