October has just finished, and for the team here at Vonage, it was a busy one. Earlier in the year, we committed to join this year's Hacktoberfest, which meant that our October would only be about one thing—Open Source.
We’re no strangers to Open Source at Vonage, with our libraries, code snippets, and demos all on GitHub, and many of our team contributing to, or maintaining other work in addition to that.
We thoroughly enjoyed supporting participants throughout October, sharing our knowledge, and chatting about how significant and awesome open source contributions can be.
Hacktoberfest has become a key event in the Open Source community’s calendar over the years. Participants were encouraged and rewarded for suggesting changes to software repositories, making the repositories more accurate and accessible for everyone to use.
Every person who submitted four successful requests during Hacktoberfest will now be rewarded with swag, including a Hacktoberfest t-shirt and Vonage-branded stickers, or have the opportunity to plant a tree.
Additionally, we also offered $5 Open Collective gift cards and what turned out to be our most in-demand bit of swag ever:
Bamboo Vonage Socks.
We'll break down this information a bit more below, but if you're looking for the TL;DR, here's what Hacktoberfest 2020 looked like for us:
Hacktoberfest in numbers (a graphical visualisation)
The most crucial part of any Hacktoberfest is the contributions that people make to projects. October saw a 254% increase in PRs (pull requests) opened across our repositories compared to the average of the last 12 months.
The number of total PRs tagged Hacktoberfest was 226, out of which 157 were tagged hacktoberfest-accepted and 117 contributions were merged.
Community and education are also at the heart of Hacktoberfest. With many of the participants making their first contributions to Open Source, providing a place to learn, communicate, inspire, and collaborate was vital.
Our Hacktoberfest Tuesday's events took place every Tuesday (obviously) in October, covering Asia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas.
Taking the form of a small virtual conference, attendees could watch inspiring talks from both our team and special guest maintainers as well as have the opportunity to get their questions answered and spend time with our team.
In addition to our events, there were several official Hacktoberfest events, and many more community organized events to be a part of. We were all over those as well!
Lorna Mitchell, one of our Senior Developer Advocates, spoke at the first official Hacktoberfest event earlier in the month:
Additionally, our colleagues took to the 'virtual' stage in a truly international manner:
Garann spoke at virtual events in Paraguay, India, and the U.K.
Diana touched areas that we had previously never reached with talks in Pakistan and Nepal as well as India.
We created 47 new education resources spanning tutorials, articles, videos, and talks to support the community during this year's event.
Each week there was something to dive into that would either get you started, inspire your next contribution or give you food for thought.
In October, one of the highlight articles was Nahrin's 33 High Impact Open Source Projects Seeking Contributors that outlined projects that were making people's lives better, impacting societal change or environmental issues (amongst many other things).
It's a fantastic resource if you're looking to give back through your Open Source contributions. Regardless of your programming language of choice, you will find something interesting to get involved with.
According to our stats, we streamed over 43 hours of Hacktoberfest specific content on Twitch in October. That is huge!
On top of our regular live streams, we committed to streaming every single working weekday in October to support Hacktoberfest on our VonageDevs Twitch channel.
It was great to have so many regular viewers join us throughout the month. We celebrated with a special, chaotic, all-team stream on Friday, 30th October, where we took the time to highlight key moments, superb contributions, fantastic community members, and more.
If you contributed a PR, attended an event, hung out in the Discord, chatted with us on a live stream, or enjoyed one of our talks, thank you.
It was a lot of work, but we truly enjoyed being a part of this year's Hacktoberfest and especially being part of the community alongside you.
It doesn't end here, though. Open Source is not just for October! You are more than welcome to contribute to our projects at any time, regardless of your background or experience.
Please find out more by checking out our Hacktoberfest 2020 site that includes lots of resources to help you get started.
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Former Director of Developer Education at Vonage. With a background as a creative developer, product manager, and hack day organizer, Martyn has been working as a technology advocate since 2012 having previously spent time in broadcasting and major record companies. Educating and empowering developers all over the world.
