Every year the folks at DigitalOcean partner up with GitHub and create a Hacktoberfest challenge during the month of October (henceforth known as #Hacktober). The challenge is always about open source, trying to encourage people to participate more in open source projects. On the Hacktoberfest site, they list projects you can participate in, focusing on projects in Javascript, Bash, C++, Python, Ruby, etc., with project owners tagging issues on their project with #Hacktoberfest so that people participating in the challenge can find things to contribute to.
During the Hacktoberfest challenge over the past few years, if you wanted to do this with PowerShell-based projects it was more difficult. You would have had to find someone who had open source PowerShell modules or scripts that you could participate in, or you could even use your own projects when the Hacktoberfest challenge was just about commits to open source repositories, but it has evolved since then and now it’s all about submitting pull requests to other repositories so you need to start playing nice with other people’s projects. It’s much easier now though, because PowerShell Core is open source, the PowerShellGet and Package Management modules just went open source, much of the documentation is open source, there are other PowerShell modules that are already open source, and more modules are going open source every day. There’s even an open source PowerShell module for DigitalOcean automation (ok, shameless plug, I wrote that one). Also, it doesn’t matter if you’re a developer, a devops engineer, a module author, a casual scripter, a PowerShell user who wants to improve documentation, or a PowerShell community member who has an idea for an RFC that would help improve the language — all of these roles have opportunities for pull requests to be submitted to help make PowerShell better for everyone. Do you know how easy it is to submit a pull request for a PowerShell docs change? Brain. Dead. Simple.
Since PowerShell has so much open source goodness now, this year lets make some noise by raising the visibility of PowerShell open source projects, and show the DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest challenge what the PowerShell community can do! According to the Octoverse, Microsoft has already demonstrated themselves as the organization with the most contributors to open source projects. Let’s take that a step further, and raise the bar by submitting a ton of pull requests against PowerShell projects this month! If you’re up for the challenge, aside from a really cool t-shirt and great stickers for your laptop, you’ll also get the pride of having contributed to something truly great!
Want to get started? Head on over to the Hacktoberfest site and click on the Start Hacking link to sign up. There are also a lot of great resources on that site if you haven’t done open source pull requests before — just scroll down to the bottom of the page. Then, throughout the month of #Hacktober, spend some time contributing to one of the many great open source PowerShell projects. Note that this isn’t limited to specific pull requests for issues tagged with #Hacktoberfest — any pull request will do.
Then, if you happen to be attending the IT/Dev Connections 2016 conference, consider coming to my Anatomy of a PowerShell Pull Request session where I’ll be talking a lot more about a lot of this kind of thing. And at any time, if your stuck, tap myself or any of the other members of the PowerShell community that are plugged into this open source movement via Twitter, or on the PowerShell Slack channel (you can sign up for that here) and ask for help! Lastly, if you’re a PowerShell open source project owner, consider tagging issues you really want people to look at in #Hacktober with the #Hacktoberfest tag so that they get more attention during this challenge (this isn’t a requirement — it is merely a facility to help community members discover issues they could submit a pull request for).
To keep visibility high and encourage others to participate, as you submit pull requests consider sending out a tweet about them with the #PowerShell and #Hacktober hashtags along with a link to this post so that others can discover the challenge as well!
Are you with me? Let’s make #Hacktober a milestone month for PowerShell open source project pull requests!
Kirk out.
Poshoholic 
Hmm, Zero Powershell issues so far. I might add some to dbareports or dbatools 🙂
Yeah, I wonder if that’s causing people to wonder what to do. I think I’m going to have to update that blog post to make it clear that any pull request to a GitHub repo counts. The #Hacktoberfest folks encourage repo owners to tag some of their issues that they’d like help with, but that’s only to help others who don’t know what to work on discover projects that are encouraging pull requests. Anyone can pick any GitHub repo and submit a pull request and it counts for #Hacktoberfest. That said, heck yeah, you should add some #Hacktoberfest tags to your repo so that people can discover the project and contribute! 🙂
Ah, I see, so any PR will do – Yes that needs to be a bit more obvious (or I need to read better 🙂 ) I will definitely add the tags to some of our issues
Thanks for the feedback, I just updated the post so that it’s easier to understand what this is all about.
I wasn’t able to find any PS based issues. How do I isolate these projects?
There are three pretty easy ways to find appropriate projects: use the search feature on github.com and search for PowerShell to find an interesting project; visit the GitHub page for a PowerShell focused team or individual (e.g. github.com/PowerShell or github.com/KirkMunro, where you can find multiple PowerShell projects that you can contribute to); or visit the PowerShellGallery.com, find a module you want to contribute to, and check to see if it has a link to the project page (usually on GitHub) in the sidebar, then visit that page to see how you can contribute. Also if you are looking at Microsoft docs that need corrections or can be improved, many docs pages on Microsoft.com or msdn now have links to the GitHub pages behind them. If you still want more help beyond these tips, please let me know and I’ll be happy to assist.