How Hacktoberfest 2020 Can Help Your Chances Of Getting a Job

Have you heard of Hacktoberfest? It could be your best chance to quickly boost your CV and secure a job.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Every October, coding fans around the world unite to take part in Hacktoberfest. It’s a celebration of the open-source coding community so naturally it’s open to everyone. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re an expert in all things tech, you’re welcome to take part.

All you need to do is sign up and contribute to an official project. Once you’re happy with your work, send a pull request to the devs so they can take a look at what you’ve changed. If they think it’s good, they can add your work to the official code. And if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, check out this article on GitHub to get down with the lingo.

If you’ve got the time to make 4 pull requests before October ends, you qualify for a great reward: the Hacktoberfest T-Shirt. But get in quick because they’re only making 70,000!

Why Should I Take Part?

Even if you’re not crazy about the free T-Shirt – why wouldn’t you be, though? – you should take part in Hacktoberfest anyway. Here’s why.

Dip Your Toes

Contributing to open-source projects can feel daunting: as a newbie, where do you start? Hacktoberfest encourages you to dive in and make small but useful improvements to all kinds of projects. You get the opportunity to become more familiar with how projects work while learning the open-source ethos.

You Can Connect With The Community

For aspiring developers working in a Covid-crazy world, it’s easy to slip into bad habits. Coding can be a lonely path, but Hacktoberfest is all about the community.

By taking part you can connect with thousands of people just like you.

You Can Contribute To Meaningful Projects

Speaking of Covid, watching everyone pull together to work on a big project is a beautiful thing. With Hacktoberfest you can contribute to projects that aim to help the environment and front-line workers. You might even make a real difference to someone.

Of course, there are plenty of less serious projects that you can contribute to when participating in Hacktoberfest – find something that interests you.

You Can Boost Your CV And Your Chances of Scoring a Job

Once you’ve helped out with some Hacktoberfest projects, add them to your portfolio! Employers love seeing all of your work because it shows that you really care about your career.

And if your projects are meaningful and make a real difference in people’s lives, all the better!

How Do I Take Part?

Here’s our step by step guide to taking the leap into Hacktoberfest. These steps are the same for everyone, but our instructions are written mainly for programmers.

There are opportunities to take part for people with other skills, such as writing documentation, creating graphics and so on – but you may need to look a little harder for the right project.

Make sure you have a Github account.
Take a look at our Github guide.
Sign up to Hacktoberfest
Click the “Start Hacking” button on the Hacktoberfest website.
Find projects that you want to contribute to
Participating projects have the hacktoberfest topic. Some projects tag issues that are good for newcomers as easy fixes or good first issues.
Fork the project
This gives you your own space to work on your changes.
Make your changes
Edit the code or documentation, paying attention to any coding style rules that project has. You might also add or alter some automated tests for your changes. Once you’re happy with your work, you’ll need to commit and push them so they’re reflected on your Github fork.

Small changes are great and encouraged, but creating noise with pointless changes is frowned upon. You change should do something – avoid making non-changes like reformatting files without functional differences or changing the copyright year.
Create your pull request
Go to the project’s repository on Github and create a pull request for your forked branch. Describe what you’ve changed and why. There’s often a template for you to fill in here.
Wait patiently
Project maintainers who review pull requests are usually volunteers, doing something for the community in their own spare time. It can take days or weeks before someone has a chance to check over your changes and give feedback.
Adapt to feedback
The reviewer might ask you to alter your changes, maybe to make some improvements that you might not have thought of or to make them more maintainable in long run.
Celebrate
Once your pull request is merged, you can bask in the glow of making the world a little bit better!

Where Can I Find a Junior Developer Job?

Junior developer jobs can be hard to find. But just like Hacktoberfest is here is help you boost your CV, DigitalGrads is here to help you get a job.