Join Us for Umbraco Hacktoberfest 2024!

Written by Sebastiaan Janssen

Hey there, Umbraco community 👋 It's that delightful time of year again— time for Hacktoberfest! Whether you're a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the world of open source, we invite you to roll up your sleeves and join us for a month of coding, collaboration, and camaraderie.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is DigitalOcean’s annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. Umbraco has joined in on the Hacktoberfest fun for the last 8 years (with our own addition to the Digital Ocean rewards) because your input and contributions help shape the Umbraco CMS, documentation, and our other projects - in fact, we rely quite heavily on them!

What’s Happening This Year?

For 2024, we’re excited to ramp up the fun and creativity with even more opportunities to contribute to the Umbraco ecosystem. From October 1st to October 31st, we’ll be celebrating all things open source, and we want YOU to be a part of it!

The rules

We expect you to stick to the same rules that Digital Ocean sets and provide high-quality contributions during the month of October.

However, to “complete” Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest you only need to provide 2 accepted contributions and then you’re in!

What’s New this year?

We just released the Umbraco 15 release candidate and we would love to hear how it works for you. Head over to the Hacktoberfest Activity Log to tell us your findings, which will count as one contribution.

If you get your 2 contributions accepted, you’re automatically entered into a raffle to get a free official Umbraco training of your choice. We’ll raffle off training to five lucky, randomly selected, participants. As always, you can also apply for swag or donation of trees - more on that in a bit.

Events

October 3 - In person

In-person: The US Community Hackathon in Charlotte, NC. This hackathon is the lead-up to the Umbraco US Festival.

October 3 - Online📹📺

UmbracoCollab - Hacktoberfest drop-in

It's not just Hacktoberfest, the Umbraco US Festival hackathon is also happening! Members from Umbraco HQ and the Core Collaborators team will be available to answer questions, provide help getting you up and running, and guiding your contributions. There's no agenda, just drop in if you want to chat about Hacktoberfest contributions.

October 11 & 12 - Online🧑‍💻

The Umbraco x Candid Contributions Hacktoberfest Hackathon: This online hackathon will be a relaxed environment for people to share ideas, seek inspiration, get guidance, find collaborators, or just have some company whilst hacking away.

October 15 - In person

In-person: The Copenhagen Umbraco Hackathon, organized by our friends at Knowit, is a great way to kick off Hacktoberfest in collaboration with people from HQ who are around to help you when you get stuck.

This is also in part a “regular” meetup with 1 confirmed talk so far: Kenn Jacobsen from Umbraco HQ will join us and talk about the exciting new features in Umbraco v15.

How to Get Involved

Participating is simple, whether you write code or contribute in other ways! We have guidance ready for you on our Documentation site.

We're looking for a wide range of contributions beyond traditional bug fixes and code updates. This includes low-code and no-code contributions like improving documentation, creating tutorials, organizing meetups, or giving a talk.

We also welcome contributions in package development, whether it's creating new packages or improving existing ones.

Additionally, sponsorships play a crucial role in supporting open-source projects, so financial contributions are one more way to contribute.

Join the Fun: Share your progress on social media using #Hacktoberfest and #Umbraco. We love seeing your hard work!

Rewards

There will be swag again this year! We’ll reveal what exactly you can earn later on in the month. 🎁

As always, if you don’t want swag, then we’ll plant a bunch of trees for you in your name for the upcoming year. 🌳🌲

Any questions?

In order to help you succeed we at HQ are trying to be available as much as possible during the month of October on Discord in the #contributing channel.

Whether you need some inspiration, guidance, help getting things to build, and so on - we’re there to support and guide you, together with the Core Collaborators team.

Let’s Celebrate Together!

So grab your laptops and your favorite snacks, and let’s make Hacktoberfest 2024 one to remember. Together, we can create great things and strengthen our vibrant Umbraco community!

Happy Hacktoberfest, everyone! 🎉