Every October, as the colors of the leaves change, and the weather turns cooler (or if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite) a global phenomenon kicks off: Hacktoberfest!

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source, started by DigitalOcean in 2014, and encourages awareness of, and participation in, the open source community. In 2019 alone, there were over 483k pull requests opened across over 154k repositories, with participants from 142 countries – a truly impressive achievement by the community.

Here at CircleCI we’ve always believed strongly in open source, and the value that it can bring to organizations. We have a long history of supporting open source projects on CircleCI, and many of the largest open source projects use CircleCI in their pipelines.

For this year’s event, anyone who meets the Hacktoberfest core requirements (minimum of 4 valid PRs submitted to an open source project) will receive event swag, including a Hacktoberfest t-shirt and stickers from the supporting sponsors.

Orbtoberfest: hack OSS with CircleCI orbs

Last year, we launched our first “Orbtoberfest” to coincide with Hacktoberfest. Orbtoberfest encouraged the community to learn about CircleCI orbs: reusable packages of YAML configuration that condenses repeated lines of config into a single line of code. Orbs help you package, ship, and re-use code. We’re revisitng Orbtoberfest this year, to help more developers learn about orbs and Hacktoberfest. You also have the chance to double your prize haul with our unique, limited edition swag.

How to get involved

There are a few ways to get involved this year. To participate in Hacktoberfest, register with DigitalOcean and submit 4 PRs that meet the specifications outlined on their page throughout the month of October. As a reward, receive Hacktoberfest swag or donate to plant a tree instead. To participate in CircleCI Orbtoberfest, you have a few options, outlined below. We hope you’ll contribute to CircleCI orbs to complete the challenge!

The challenges:

Challenge 1
Create a PR, with “Orbtoberfest” as the label, to include orb usage on an existing CircleCI config and get that PR accepted or merged. Valid contributions to other CircleCI repos, like Docs, may also be considered.

Prizes:
1-3 PRs receive a sticker pack 4 PRs receive stickers and a T-shirt

Challenge 2:
Develop and publish an orb using the Orb Development Kit. Make sure your orb solves a challenge that other developers might be facing.

Prizes:
Sticker pack T-shirt Limited edition Orbtoberfest pin

Once you’ve completed the challenge(s) above, fill out this form to receive your swag. After the month of October is over, we will process all submissions, verify them, and let you know how you can claim your special CircleCI swag. We are so excited to see all of the contributions to open source and our orbs that will be created this year!

Make sure to join the Orbtoberfest discussion on our community forum for ideas, FAQs, and to ask any questions. You can also follow along with the conversations on Twitter via the #hacktoberfest and #orbtoberfest hashtags!