DevRel tips for Hacktoberfest

Matthew: Welcome to another DevRel Round table. My name is Matthew Revell and I'm joined by,

Suze: Hello everybody. My name's Suze Shardlow. I am the head of developer community at Redis.

Matthew: Excellent. So Suze, today we are what, let's have a look at the dates. We're about two, three days away from Hacktoberfest 2022. And it seems like a good time to have a quick recap of some of the advice and tips that people should be following if they're a DevRel person looking to get the most out of Hacktoberfest.

Suze: Yeah, I'm so excited. I've got my uniform on, I dunno if you can see it on the street. Excellent. I've got my T-shirt that I earned last year. But yeah, Hacktoberfest. Sometimes you say Hacktoberfest to people and they have not got a clue what you mean. They think you mean Oktoberfest, which is a totally different thing and some people are really into it. And I think as dele professionals there is a lot that we can give back to the community with Hacktoberfest and a lot that we can get out of it too.

And I actually organised Hacktoberfest for Redis. That's the first time that they had run it last year and it was a lot of fun. So we're going to do it again this year, but today we're going to hear from some folks who are very experienced in this, but also somebody from Digital Ocean who can talk us through it. For those of you who don't know much about Hacktoberfest.

Matthew: Yeah. And of course Digital Ocean is the originator and I guess the main sponsor and organiser of the global event. So let's bring Phoebe Quincy in from Digital Ocean. Hi Phoebe, how are you doing? Hello,

Phoebe: I'm great. How are you? All good, thanks. Oh well

Matthew: Thanks. Yeah, very well. So Phoebe, you are the Hacktoberfest person at Digital Ocean. What's the plan for this year? What are you hoping for?

Phoebe: So this year the primary thing that we really wanted to highlight and raise up to the community is that there are lots of folks who have great skills who can participate in contributing to open source, who don't necessarily have heavy technical skills. They have great social media marketing skills, they have great writing skills, their advocacy folks who want to help in sort of an evangelistic kind of way, but maybe they don't necessarily have a tonne of technical expertise. So we really wanted identified this problem last year is that it's actually fairly tricky for people to find how to contribute with non code contributions and we wanted to bring that out more to the community and for maintainers as well is best ways to label their repos to try and solicit that help how to write the read mes and their contributor information to get those non code contributions. And the more people that we see participating in contributing to open source, the better for open source. And that means being really inclusive, right? Because we want everybody from all different walks of life to participate in them. And the more that we can make it available for people who aren't necessarily super technical, the better it'll be for all of us.

So that's a big thing that we're focusing on is there's a spectrum low code to non code because there are some things that people can do contribution wise that are relatively low code, knowing how to interface with a GitHub repository or a GitLab repository, knowing how to get onto the command line that requires a little bit of technical expertise, but it's fairly low lift. And then also sometimes writing things like technical documentation that requires a higher level, but in general we really want to open it up and get it out more that this is an area of growth for the open source community that all of us can get to work on and help with.

Matthew: Is there still I guess some reluctance or nervousness from people been, I remember in the Ubuntu community many years ago, one of the things that we wanted to do was to level up and make equal the non code contributions, but people were sometimes intimidated and nervous about, well

Phoebe: I'm not sure I hope I'm answering this question, but I think we have Hacktoberfest from its very beginning was a very bootstrappy event that was really initiated by sort of senior developers helping mentor younger developers. And as Hacktoberfest has morphed over the years, it really has become a haven for people who are trying to learn how to get started in tech. And there's lots of reasons why we help you learn how to make contributions, which is if you're working on any kind of dev project, understanding how to do get is key. So learning git, we make it very friendly for beginners. So there's a huge contingent of folks who participate in Hacktoberfest who are beginners. And I'd say the biggest barrier for entry for them is just the intimidation factor that you mentioned, which is how do I get started? So one of the primary reasons Hacktoberfest exists is to try and make it easy for people to try and reduce those barriers.

We show you how you can get started and it's not just us, it's our partners and all the folks out there in the community who just participate in Hacktoberfest because they love the community aspect of it. So there are hundreds of events that happen over the month where you can join in and you can learn from the very beginning, what is Git, what is a repository, how do I get involved in this and what do I have that I could contribute? And so yeah, I think that as Hacktoberfest is morphed, we've become more focused on that beginner aspect than we have in the past. And even now with our focus for this year, which is on low to non code contributions, we're even trying to open that up even more. But there is still a contingent of folks who participate in Hacktoberfest that are veterans, long time developers and engineers who love mentoring others and doing something good for the community. So how those proportions they meld together, I'm not quite sure what the numbers are, but I would say that in general we are just an incredibly beginner friendly event.

Suze: Cool. So you are very much focusing on the sort of the no-code, low-code segment this year and you're trying to increase the contributions from that section of the community and I think that is a section that is quite often forgotten about because you think about the dev community, you think about development, you think about coding, people forget about all the other stuff, which is essential as well. Can you give us a couple of examples because I think people are going to be wondering what can I open a pool request against if I'm not going to be writing code, if I'm not going to be doing documentation? The other big area that people generally sort of say you can contribute to open source or that you can get your feet wet in. So if you're not coding and you're not writing documentation, can you give us a couple of ideas of what you could open a pool request for during Hacktoberfest?

Phoebe: Yeah, absolutely. So just to give you kind of an example of how this got onto my radar is that internally at Digital Ocean we always do a push to try and get folks within the company to participate. And lots of folks within Digital Ocean have nothing to do with developer relations or engineering. There's folks in accounting, there's folks in marketing, they have the technical know-how of the industry, but they don't necessarily have the specific skills that are involved with making pull requests against repositories. And when we talked to some of those folks, they shared with us their frustration in trying to find how to do this. So we wanted to try and break it down a little bit more. And this year we really focused on some key areas. So one we kind of call writing in general because there are many writing things that folks can do that don't necessarily have to do with technical documentation.

So it could be writing a blog post, it could be writing a social media post. That kind of also falls onto another category that we are focusing on, which is what we're calling advocacy. That's where I was mentioning that evangelistic community evangelistic aspect.

Having social media expertise is often not something that goes hand in hand with engineering. And so being able to contribute through marketing efforts, writing content and helping with strategy. Now this is another problem that we encounter in the community, which is that a lot of times maintainers don't really have a specific task set aside that fits that criteria. So we're also kind of simultaneously putting out the call to action to the community on the maintainer side, which is make it easy for these folks just like we have a label for first contributions, maybe we need to have a label for no-code or no-code or low-code, something along those lines that helps flags something for people so that they know that this repository has tasks available. Obviously we can't tell the community what they have to do, but that's something that we would recommend because as a person who's just getting started, it can be a pretty bewildering experience to get in there and just being able to find a repository that has those tasks and has something that they can actually do a pull request against. Another category that we kind of focused on for the low and non code is design. So user experience testing, graphic design, video production, those are areas that projects often could use some help with. And so that's where we're suggesting that people could contribute their expertise.

Suze: Cool. Yeah, so it sounds like you are really encouraging maintainers to make those types of repos available, which I think traditionally a lot of maintainers haven't necessarily done. So it makes sense to put your code or a lot of your code out there as open source, but not necessarily your strategic documents or your blog or sometimes that's closed off to people and I think that probably a lot of people haven't thought about how do we make our design documents or our design work so that other people can contribute to them. So I think this is going to be quite an interesting discussion today.

Phoebe: Yeah. Well and we've thought about it on our side too, for Hacktoberfest, what could we do to make Tober Fest more open? So these are discussions that happen are happening internally as well. We've talked about open sourcing the front end of our website and soliciting design feedback.

Suze: So I always, I said at the beginning that sometimes you say the word Hacktoberfest to people, and I haven't got a scuba deal what you're talking about. If you had to just tell somebody what Hacktoberfest was and didn't, you're explaining it to a family member, how would you describe Hacktoberfest to somebody who doesn't know what it is?

Phoebe: It is tough because when you're speaking to an agnostic community, it is kind of hard to explain what pull requests are, but this is the way that I do it. So Hacktoberfest is a month long event where we celebrate open source and what we do is we crowdsource contributions to open source projects. So then it depends on your audience. Maybe they know what open source projects are, maybe they don't. So maybe then you have to go into a description of what an open source project is. But essentially what we do is we try and incentivize folks to contribute by giving them a reward kit. This year we will have a limited quantity of reward kits, about 40,000. So we are asking folks to do four pull requests to receive a reward kit.

What's included in that reward kit are some fun swaggy items like stickers, and of course the iconic Hacktoberfest t-shirt. Yay. I love that you're wearing yours. And yeah, so the T-shirt has become somewhat of a hot ticket item and there's more we can talk about that. I'm sure you've got some questions in your back pocket about what has happened with Hacktoberfest in the past. But essentially Hacktoberfest is a challenge that you can participate in during the month of October where we want you to go out there and find open source projects that you can contribute to and try and do four of those and then you can get a reward kit.

Matthew: Welcome. Thank you for joining us. So we have Courtney Robertson from GoDaddy, we have Haimantika from AppWright, and we have Floor Drees from Aiven. Each of you has a role to play in Hacktoberfestthis year as part of your DevRel programme. Also, you're at somewhat different stages as well in terms of your involvement with Hack Toba first. So perhaps would you mind introducing yourselves and just giving a little bit about your programme and why you're taking part in Hacktoberfest? So Floor,

Floor: I get to start. Yeah. Hi, my name is Floor. I'm a staff developer advocate at Aiven. And although in previous years at previous companies, I have done a lot for Hacktoberfest events externally. So for instance, hosting kickoff events and providing extra swag for people that would contribute to our projects that were up on GitHub or through contributing that today, which is a meetup that I run on open source topics. We did a lot of interviews with maintainers to figure out what kind of help they needed and specifically I love the theme for this year specifically on what kind of things they could use help with that are not code necessarily. So I love where Hacktoberfest is going in that regard.

This year I met Aiven and we have just found that the company is growing so incredibly quickly and while the core of Ivan was very, very open source minded, everything got contributed back to upstream immediately.

A lot of the new donors are not necessarily aware of what open source is, what the rules of engagement are, what are some of the ways that they can also get in on the party. And so we're also focusing our programme this year on a lot of internal awareness and enablement. So we're running weekly office hours at different times of the day to accommodate for different time zones with a couple of champions and we just help people with all and any of their questions concerning Hacktoberfest and how to contribute to open source, even doing little breakout sessions if people don't have a GitHub profile yet and get them on GitHub. So it's very hands-on, but very internally focused, whereas previous years I was definitely more externally focused.

Matthew: Haimantika, could you tell us about what you're doing with Hacktoberfest?

Haimantika: Yeah, definitely. So hi everyone and thank you for being here. So Appwrite is one of the sponsors of Hackfest and they have been doing so for almost two to three years now, way before even I joined. So basically Appwright, I'll just give you a brief about what Appwrite does. So it's a backend as a service and we are an open source project. So our core is open source and that is why we participate in Hackfest. And our motto is to help and introduce more people to open source and open source us to help and preach about the word open source. So we do a lot of initiatives and we have already started doing that from September, even right now live event is going on where we are telling people what is open source and the basics of open source, why should one get started about hack first and everything that one needs to get started with.

And other than that, we mentioned this year we are also very much focusing on low and no-code streams. So at Appwright we are trying our best to have repositories where everybody is welcome to participate and we are trying to be as inclusive as possible so that we have contributions from everybody, we developers, non-developers, logo developers, everybody is welcome to participate. So yeah, that's pretty much it.

Matthew: And Courtney,

Courtney: Hey there. So I am at GoDaddy Pro and my work and then empowers me to contribute to WordPress as part of that responsibility. I do some dev work inside of GoDaddy. I also do some dev work that is a lot of my time in contributing to WordPress specifically, which is an open source project. Out of that there are 21 teams and I am one of the three co reps for the WordPress training team. Our team is gearing up to make official WordPress certification. We have a lot of resources on learn. wordpress.

org. So this would be in the realm of technical documentation, professional organised training, and we have a new initiative for getting this into as many languages as we can. Today is WordPress Translation Day, so all of our polyglots folks are busy translating some strings of code and things. But starting on Friday we have a translation event for all of that content that's online.

And in addition to that, we are also gearing up for a major WordPress release that happens at the beginning of November. So I'm not sure if anybody within the WordPress organisation overall has organised with Hacktoberfest previously, but I was really excited about the low and no code areas because while we do have a bit inside of our specific team that deals with the look of our site that would be developer oriented pull requests to make, there is a lot that goes on that is very specifically content and creating that content in video form, text screenshots, et cetera. And also now in translating it. So I'm the one that's new at organising for all of this, but I'm super excited about it.

Matthew: What have you learned from your participation in Hacktoberfest in the past that if you could have someone else come to you and say Don't do this or do this, what would you want to hear essentially?

Floor: I think even with how many times you encourage people to contribute in a non code way, it is still really hard to explain to them that this is really for them as well. And I sort of recognise this from in a hundred years ago I was running a lot of Rails Girls events and just showing people that a beginner course in a computer language, it's really for them as well. It is a beginner language so you don't have to know anything about code yet. But that sort of kept on being hard to explain to people and get them on board sort of. So just a continuous, I think that's just sort of repetition, repetition, repetition and a lot of encouragement and a lot of one-on-one conversations in order to get people over that initial barrier. I guess while I was always just very excited about open source and very excited about contributing to open source, so I couldn't understand why other people didn't immediately have that same sort of enthusiasm.

Suze: That actually that's a really important point because Hacktoberfest is for the entire month of October, October's a long month and there's going to be somebody in your command chain somewhere in the command chain, even if it isn't your immediate boss, sometimes it is your immediate boss that says, hang on a minute, you're going to be dealing with this for a whole month with other members of the team. Are you going to get anything else done? Why are you doing this? Why is it important? How have you managed to persuade people in your organisation who have got authority that this is a good idea? Haimantika, you're smiling. Have you got any experience there of how you've had to persuade people?

Haimantika: I think it was pretty easy for me mostly because Appwright is open source in itself, so I didn't really have to go through a long process of explaining to people that why we are participating and it's just a month where we are fully working with open source where our whole focus in on Hacktoberfest. But other than that, throughout our daily job we also focus since our project is open source, so we focus a lot on open source. And I also think that it gives a, also gives a good, I would say a to our project that people from Hack first people get to know, okay, there is a company or a project named app, right? And they're building stuff. So I guess that is how Hacktoberfest in turn will help us in brand building and also with all the initiatives that we have been doing so far. And our company is very community focused and developer focused as well. So when we do that, we will get to know Appwrite has a Discord channel, they have committee members initiative. And I think that is how we end up getting.

So in my situation for us, we are helping developers, we are helping anybody in the open source community to come and contribute and in the end we're also getting something out of it. So I think that's why it has been very easy for me to go up to leadership and talk about this.

Suze: Yeah, I think I envy you actually because I think sometimes even when you have a product that is open source, sometimes there's other priorities. So a lot of the time you're also trying to sell, so you're trying to sell that same product package in a different way. It's not going to be on premises. You are going to have some managed piece. So I think that a lot of the time leadership are looking for how this translates back into sort of sales or marketing outputs. And I'll be interested to hear from Flor or Courtney or even Phoebe as to how to get buy-in from higher ups who don't necessarily understand it even though you might have an open source product.

Phoebe: Well, I'd be happy to jump in on that. Obviously Hacktoberfest is one of Digital Ocean's Premier events or marketing programmes and there is a commercial aspect to Hacktoberfest. Yes, we are all devoted and really believe in our hearts that what we're doing is good for the open source community, which benefits us. We understand that intrinsically. But when you're talking to executive leadership who are focused on shareholders and profit margins and how the business is operating, what does the programme bring to the company? There is a lot of justification that has to occur and it largely is based off of numbers. And one of the projects that I just recently did, we had a fantastic intern join us, Hector Allcon, who did some great research work for us. That was really important for me to be able to justify why we spend so much energy on Hector Fest.

And that work was to assess internally how much are we utilising open source projects within Digital Ocean, within our products and our services and within our own functions, our engineering teams, like how many hours of work are we saving by utilising open source technologies? And it was tremendous. It was so overwhelming that it's just a no brainer. There's no way that we could operate without contributing back to the open source communities. We rely so heavily on certain technologies and we have engineer groups that are focused on contributing upstream to some of those core technologies, but there's literally nothing that we could do that would be enough for us to justify how heavily reliant we are. So we see not only is Hacktoberfest important for us from a marketing perspective, but it is really important to us because we understand how reliant we are on these tele technologies. And so the more that we can contribute back to them, the more that we can do to help build them up, the better off it is for us and then for our customers. So that's kind of the bottom line for us.

Courtney: I would say the same is quite true at GoDaddy as well. A lot of our hosting is with WordPress, not all of it, but a lot of our websites that we're hosting for our customers are WordPress powered and there's other open source initiatives both internally from GoDaddy creating open source projects, but then also leveraging open source in what we offer to our customers as well. And then when I look at specifically why does that matter as it relates to my specific realm of what I can do, our customers need to learn how to use WordPress once they get their sites and we need resources for our customers, our staff, ongoing training of our staff through all skill levels and to make sure that that's accessible and available globally. And what better way to do that than at the definitive source on wordpress. org itself? In our case, I haven't really faced the same kind of questions inside of wordpress. org. I've asked other team reps if there's anyone else that's starting to work on using Hacktoberfest to create some awareness strong me to leverage that is that I'm always looking for new avenues of reaching the open source community and saying that we would love to have contributors as it relates to this area.

And I know that WordPress is huge and the open source community is huge. So I'd like to just continue elevating that opportunity and creating some awareness for contribution efforts.

Floor: I feel like I've just been very lucky to work at a couple of companies that were very much, were so open source at their core. I worked at K Labs before and then at Microsoft before and never, so didn't really have to sell it, but I had two arguments that were returning quite frequently. One was, what are you doing? October is conference season, you don't have time for this as a developer relations person. And then also the recurring sort of argument is that in previous years, of course maintainers couldn't sort of opt out of entering into Hector or Fest and they had a lot of terrible prs. It seems that it hasn't trickled down yet enough that the programme has changed and you now need to, it's an active opt-in, so that is very different, but a lot of people still have that sort of feeling or that thought in the back of their mind that that is what Hacktoberfest is. And so that also bears a lot of repeating that that's no longer true get with the programme.

Suze: Yeah, that is a really good point because a couple of years ago there was this huge thing where folks were going and making videos on YouTube, go and make an open source contribution. Just add a white space or a comma or full, do your full pull request, you can get a T-shirt. And so the organisations organisers of Hto Fest have brought in some measures to make sure that the contributions are of a high quality. Phoebe, did you want to just take us through a couple of those just to lay people's minds at rest? Sure. They may not have been involved in Hacktoberfest for the last couple of years because maybe they felt it was too much work. What makes it easier for maintainers if they want to get involved this year? For

Phoebe: Sure. So number one, maintainers have to opt in. So by adding the Hacktoberfest topic to your repository, then you can apply the Hacktoberfest accepted label to individual PRs and MRs so that way you have control about whether or not you participate. In the past that wasn't the case and so people were contributing to projects that the maintainer wasn't prepared to handle at all. So this way when maintainers opt in with the Hacktoberfest topic, they're saying, I'm ready for you. I'm ready to accept your prs. I, the other thing that we do is that we label spammy prs. And so what we define as spammy PR is that if you are just doing, like you said just a second ago, adding a hyphen, adding a white space, dropping in a period, you're just doing something superfluous that doesn't really actually help the project.

It's just to do the pr. We consider that spam. And so if we label something like a pull request or a merger request with the spam label, it'll be treated as a spam and that will not be counted towards your four pull requests. And if users have two or more spam prs, they will be permanently disqualified If your PRS and MRs, they only count once they're accepted by a maintainer. So the maintainer actually has to apply the Hacktoberfest accepted label to your PR and mr and that will give you an overall approving review. So there is actually a waiting period when you've contributed your pr. There's a little bit of a waiting period to give that maintainer time. And then we've instituted a reporting system for bad repositories so the community can actually help police this and they can let us know if there's a repository that's been designed to cheat Hacktoberfest.

So just giving an example, somebody set up a repository that only was set up for the purpose of accepting crappy PRs. So we don't want to do that. The whole purpose of Hacktoberfest is to actually help maintainers who are doing a project and give them quality work. So we really focus on the quality. The other thing that we've done is we've really reduced the emphasis we used to really lead forward with the T-shirt. We've really reduced the emphasis on the T-shirt and winning the prize. We really want to bring communities together. I mean the overall message that I've been hearing from all of you as you've been talking about Hacktoberfest, that actually warms my heart very much is that it's the community aspect of it.

Getting in there, talking to other people, networking, helping others. This is what Hacktoberfest is about. It is not about winning a T-shirt.

Suze: Yeah, totally. So it sounds like you've put in loads of different measures from both sides there and it's really good now that you have to opt in because I remember the days where it was just any for pull requests at all and then because people were fully abusing that you've had to put in these measures. So thanks for summarising that for us. So just leading on from a little bit that we were saying earlier about how to get buy-in. So like I said, October is a long month and you've got your buy-in from your higher ups. For those of us on the call here, it is been easier maybe because they could see the benefit. For some of you it is going to be a hard foot and you are going to now be stuck with a month of maintaining Hacktoberfest. So how do we as DevRel professionals keep the momentum up for that long month of October?

I'm painting it to be this really horrible thing, but actually it isn't. But it is a long time. The days are going to start getting shorter soon here in the northern hemisphere and everything. How are you going to keep the momentum up and throughout that whole month?

Courtney: Conveniently plan a major release that needs a lot of updates right after it? That was coincidental. I realised the dates well after that was already planned.

Suze: Sounds good to me. Sounds very good. Anyone else got any, I dunno how we can follow that one. That was excellent tip.

Phoebe: I can say from our side, we're holding an event a week that's from Digital Ocean. We're hosting four livestream events that can be joined pretty much from everywhere. We have one APAC specific event, so we're hoping that by holding those events, we did see last year that there was a really steep drop off in registrations from right after the first week and then it picked back up again at the end and we held a livestream event at the beginning of the livestream event at the end. So we're hoping that by having those livestream events where we get people together and keep it on top of mind on their radar. The other thing I wanted to mention really quickly too is that if you do have concerns about spam or anything like that, we have a pretty detailed section about all of that on the Hacktoberfest website under participation.

So make sure you go check that out. And also our livestream events are there, and if you are running a Hacktoberfest event that you would like to have posted on the Hacktoberfest website, there is a place to go and submit a new event request. It's actually a little bit hidden at the moment, but in the line of items for how to organise your event there is submit your new event request, you just mouse over those words, that's a link to a form where you can submit your event and we can verify your event and then we'll put it up there on the website and people all over the world would be able to find your event. So another reason why we're hoping that that will help support contributions throughout the month is being able to show everybody all these community events that are happening throughout the month.

Suze: Yeah, definitely worth holding an event or even some sort of like Phoebe said, some sort of live stream in the month if you have time to do so. A live stream is probably going to be less effort than writing a blog post and making a video. And what we did at Redis last year was we did have at least one live event where we actually showcased some of the poor requests that we had received to sort of give a bit of kudos back to the contributors and really show our gratitude because that was, like I said at the beginning, that was the first time Redis had run Hacktoberfest. So we weren't really too sure what to expect. And we were really, really humbled and pleased by the poor requests that we received. Partly because some of the contributors, some of them weren't even backend engineers.

So Redis is a database, so you're expecting backend engineers to come and some of them weren't backend engineers, some of them were, but they had never used Redis, but they found it really easy to get up and running. So for us, that gave us some really good feedback that what we had written in our documentation on our read mes actually worked because people were able to look at that and just get up and running with that repost straight away, get it running on their local machine, do their contribution and then have it merged. The other thing that I did was because I was kind of always thought that documentation's been a bit neglected and people don't really think that it's that important and a lot of people don't ever make any is that we as part of the DevRel team at Redis, we have documentation team.

So I ran some fireside chats with them. There were three people in that team at the time. So I ran a group fireside chat a bit like this one. So it was all of them. And then I did a one-to-one with them as well. And they all had different backgrounds, which was really good. So one of them was a software engineer and one of them wasn't, and then one of them the manager. So I just talked to them about how they got into it and how they would advise other folks who were thinking about it as well.

You can do stuff that's aligned to it, which isn't necessarily about your repos, but just generally about the open source arena. The other thing that we found kept the momentum up is that we put out some issues that could be reused. So it wasn't just one issue that was like once it's solved and PRS merged in, that issue's gone. It's an issue that's kind of evergreen. So for example, you might have take the CSS and do what you want with it. So somebody can come and do that. We merge their pool request in, it's really good. And then we keep that issue open for anyone else who wants to come in and do a little bit more.

Haimantika: Those are some really great tips. So what we do at Appwrite as well, and I think that helped us a lot. So we are a remote company and there are people from throughout the world. So basically our entire team is available 24 87 because when us is sleeping, we are awake. And also what we have done is we have divided our tasks really well. So if there is a design pr, it's a design team that reviews it and takes care of it. Similarly, if there is some advocacy related pr, it's we who takes care of it. And then if it's engineering pr, it's the engineering team that does it.

And all of you mentioned, so even we have some online streams and what we do is it's a bit reoccurring. We have almost two to three happening in a week and to make sure that all of us are not really tired.

So we make sure that one person from the team is hosting it every week, one at a week. And I think that so far it has turned out really well. And this year what we are trying to do is host an in-person event. So I'm not really sure how it goes, but what we are trying to do is start with two locations first and then see if that goes well. I think we'll do the same for a few more locations, but if not this year than the next year. So I think dividing the tasks and planning it all beforehand is what works out really well for us.

Floor: Under defining the task, I should say that the DevRel team is working together with our OPO at I to get this done because we definitely need more people and more time zones to support everyone internally. And on the topic of life. James Matthew, when we were talking, I was saying, so you're definitely have Joe Nash on the call with this Ray Dev live stream where all kinds of poor requests were emerged at the spot. There were code reviews on the spot and he invited a bunch of interviewees too. I thought that was one of the best sort of Hacktoberfest initiatives I've ever seen and I've really enjoyed that one. But I do know that I was really exhausting for him as well, so I'm not sure if he would ever do anything like that again or would recommend if anyone else do it.

Phoebe: Hopefully we'll have Joe on our kickoff call. I have to talk to him and make sure that he joined us last year, so we'll see. But yes, he is amazing.

Matthew: What about advice for people who are acting as maintainers or becoming involved in Hacktoberfest for the first time this year? What are those things that you don't necessarily know upfront?

Floor: I think setting expectations is just really important. They might get nothing. They might get very overwhelmed and everything in between, and as long as they're ready for that uncertainty, they might have a really good time.

Suze: I think one thing I would advise people to do is make sure that you are really clear in your issue what you want folks to do. Don't put anything vague up because it's not going to help anybody. So just be really clear about it and maybe treat it like when you write a commit and if you find yourself having to type and just stop that and make you commit and do a separate one because you shouldn't have two things. So see if you could split that issue out into discrete chunks because then you get more people involved. But also it's really, really clear what you want people to do because otherwise I think you're just going to run into problems going back and forth with people. We actually, because we were so clear in our issues and so specific, we didn't have too much going back and forth with folks to try and give them feedback or answer questions. Everybody kind of understood. And so I think it really pays to put a lot of work into your issues in the first place and it will really pay off later.

Anybody else?

Courtney: I'll just put a call out that I'm interested to see how other projects that might be low. No code contributors. We do organise the content that goes out on Learn via our GitHub issues. We have a GitHub project board, but we do all of our writing directly on a WordPress powered website and link our resources at it. So we aren't using prs. mrs. As far as the content piece goes, I could certainly put together some training for how people can perhaps log that, but I would be interested to see if there other technical docs oriented or translation oriented, low no code, how they're setting up their contemp repos specifically for contributors that might have a profile but might not be using prs. And MRS very frequently how I can best maintain that

Phoebe: I think is actually a really, really relevant question because this is something that comes up whenever we talk about low to non code is people, what do I do if there's not something I can actually do a pull request against? Because for it to count for Hacktoberfest, it has to be a PR and mr. But there are ways that some folks are utilising sort of activity logs as a way to track that information. And from our side, from the enablement side, we haven't really figured out a way on the Hacktoberfest side to count that as a contribution. So this is another reason why I wanted to bring this up to the community. It's like we've got to figure out a better way to do this because we're actually really hamstringing ourselves by not being able to make it easy for people to do this because they have skills and experience that we can all benefit from. And so yeah, I would love to see more of that too. Future shows, I want to bring it up every time because I feel like this is like we have an opportunity as leaders in the community to change what we're doing.

I'm giving that mandate to everybody go out there and work with your maintainers to make it easier for people to do these kinds of contributions.

Suze: Yeah, I agree with that and I think it's really scary for people, and this is why Hacktoberfest exists to make it less scary for people to get involved, but it is really scary. You find a repo and you think, oh yeah, I could really make a good contribution to that, but it's not clear whether it's welcomed. I don't even know this thing's being maintained. I dunno how they want me to submit it. If we as maintainers can make that all clear to people, it will make the whole open source world a much more welcoming place. So somebody's posted in the chat here, they're curious if any of the guests who already have their first pool request planned anybody. Anyway, it's still Preptemper, so kudos to you if you have. But has anyone thought about what they're going to do for the first pool request?

I haven't even looked at the labels yet. I think I'm one of those people who's a bit scared to look. It's says Good first issue and I'm like, I dunno if that looks like it's beyond me. So I'm going to go and have a look and see, but I haven't actually checked out the Hacktoberfest tag, but there must be some things that are already up there.

Phoebe: Yeah, there definitely are. And I did my first pr, but it's not going to be counted towards Hacktoberfest. It's just I wanted to get in there and refresh my memory about how to do this and put myself sort of in the beginner mindset again. So I did Cloud Haiku, which is a Digital Ocean hosted. It's a first contributions labelled one, and I'm actually working with Lisa Talia. I'm going to help maintain that one this year. So that's a new thing for me is helping to maintain. So I'm really excited about that.

But yeah, finding a first project that's good. I would start by looking at those tags, but then you have to do your due diligence and actually really read the contributing MD file and just make sure you know what you're getting yourself into.

Courtney: There are a few new features that are shipping WordPress that the theme that we use to run our particular site doesn't have yet implemented. And I'm going to try and multipurpose this to know End. I want to create those features, but while creating the features, document it in a way that would teach others how to do it on other sites. So do it for our team's end site where our content goes to live learn.wordpress.org, get those features there, but then at the same time, also make the content types about that particular topic of how to do the thing. So we'll see. Hopefully I'll get somewhere with all of that while also maintaining the team.

Suze: I love how you're kind of laughing hysterically to yourself, but just the mere thought of trying to get done.

Courtney: Yeah, yeah. I would like it to happen. We'll see.

Suze: Yeah, good luck with that. But we're all with you. We're all behind you.

Floor: I am trying to persuade the DevOps Days crew to make sure that we also participate in Hacktoberfestt because there is a lot of, I dunno, librarian work to do on that repository. It's also humongous this repository mostly because of a lot of pictures. And of course in 2020 2021, there weren't a lot of events that were actually taking place, but all of those pictures are still there and are bloating the repo. So I feel like I would love to spend my Hector Fest cleaning up that thing.

Suze: That is a good point. Yeah, Hacktoberfest could be seen as a time to sort of do a little bit of an autumn clean, although I suppose for some people it is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, it is spring. So yeah, world works. Yeah.

Matthew: Wonderful. Look, thank you so much for spending the past hour with us. Any closing thoughts from anyone as we move into October

Suze: For maintainers? I would say look after your contributors, treat them with love and kindness because it is scary to make that first step. So as easy as you can make it for them, but also treat yourself with love and kindness. Please don't put out 60 issues if it's just you managing the whole thing on behalf of your company because you might get burnt out by the 5th of October. So yeah, take it in moderation. You can always start with out with five issues and then add more as the month goes on. You don't have to put all your issues out on day one. So yeah, that's what I would say.

Haimantika: I think I would like to add something to what suze just said. So I want to make sure that everybody who is participating who take it, it's supposed to be fun and a good learning experience for all of us the entire month. So this is something that is not supposed to be taken as in a competitive manner. I have seen that being done in the past. So I would say that anybody who is participating or maintaining, so this is the month where we just celebrate open source and we enjoy the process rather than being competitive. So yeah, just have fun, contribute and make good stuff. That's it.

Floor: I like grab at least one person by the hand who never thought that they had a role in open source and make them make a contribution.

Phoebe: I love that. If we all help somebody who doesn't really know what open source is, get familiarised. We're helping the community because who knows where they'll go. And actually that was going to be my thing that I was going to bring up. You led me right in there, flora. Thank you. One of the things that we would like to do this year in our comms for Hacktoberfest is share people's stories about how they got involved with Hacktoberfest, how it affected their career. A lot of people network during Hacktoberfest and use it as a way to level up in their careers.

And so we'd love to hear those stories. So once you register, you'll be opted in to our emails. And if you're okay with that, you can always opt out. Then you'll be able to get a link to where you can share your story and we'd love to hear from you because that's one of the things that is really amazing about Hacktoberfest is how many people participate this year? We think around 150,000 people globally from 194 different countries. We'll be participating. We'd love to hear those stories and share them with the rest of the community, what keeps us going.

Matthew: Amazing. Those numbers are quite startling when you actually hear them. It's truly a global movement that will impact many people's lives. Yeah. Amazing. Well, look, thank you so much everyone for joining us. I wish each of you a fruitful and hopefully not too tiring Hacktoberfest. Where can people find each of you online if they want to check out the work that you're doing?

Phoebe: Well, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. Phoebe Quincy at Phoebe Quincy both places.

Matthew: Courtney, how about you?

Courtney: Courtney r Dev is my site with links to all my socials. Courtney r Dev on Twitter is the most likely place to catch me.

Matthew: Hi.

Haimantika: Yeah, I'm there on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. But Haimantika is my Twitter handle and that's where I stay active most of the times.

Floor: Florida, you'll find links to all of my socials.

Matthew: Great. And Sue, there is a sign that we could all read.

Suze: Yeah, email me and let me know what's the BLI on and message you received. You can find [email protected] like Courtney or my social links one there, but I'm basically Sue Charlow everywhere because I haven't met anyone with the same name as me yet. So yeah, please do hit me up. I'd love to chat to anybody about all things Tech.

Matthew: Great. And I would like to invite you to check out things on developer relations. com. And also if you are in the mood, we have calls for paper, papers, paper Open currently for DevRelCon Please do find those at developerrelations. com. Well thank you everyone. We will see each other I guess, around on the internet. Thank you.

And goodbye.

Haimantika: Thanks everyone. Have fun.

Suze: Thank

Haimantika: You. Have fun everyone.