The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - #Hacktoberfest isn’t just about a free shirt (Interview)

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it's an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it's about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it. Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to Linode.com slash Changelog. This episode is brought to you by Vetteri, a hiring marketplace that connects job seekers in tech with the hiring managers from top companies in the U.S. And I had a chance to talk with Brian Levy, VP of Product, about one of the most memorable and impactful things about the job seekers experience on Vetteri. Every candidate on Vetteri gets assigned their very own talent executive who guides them every step of the way.

The talent executives is an internal team that works with candidates as they're coming on the platform, helps them fill out their preferences. We get on the phone with job seekers and talk through their backgrounds and what they're looking for in their career. And then once job seekers are on the platform, we help them look into roles and companies that they're interviewing with and talk through offers that they get on the platform in order to make sure that they get tailored offers

that meet their requirements and their career goals. It sounds like you're holding a candidate's hand through the whole process. Yeah, definitely. Working with a talent executive is essentially having a personal career coach who can help you think through how does the job relate to your career goals? Like what should I be asking for in an offer? What should I be doing to prepare for an interview? Essentially what a career coach would do. So it's often a very isolating experience. Vetteri has found a way to ensure that job seekers aren't alone in the process. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that it's really something that we hear a lot from job seekers on Vetteri is that working with a talent executive is often the thing that is most memorable and most impactful about their

experience on better is that they have someone to bounce ideas off of who can help them think through their career goals and decide, is this the right company for me? And if it is, how am I going to land this job? All right, take that first step head to better.com slash change log to learn more and get started. Also, our listeners get a $500 signing bonus when you find your job through Vetteri. Once again, that's Vetteri, V-E-T-T-E-R-Y.com slash changelog. From Changelog Media, you are listening to The Changelog. We talk about the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief of Changelog. Today, we're talking about Hacktoberfest, a once-per-year event in the month of October celebrating open source.

For many, this is an on-ramp to open source. PR galore for maintainers. T-shirts for those who submit five or more pull requests. But in the end, it is about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good of humanity as we know it. We sat down with Daniel Zaltman, DevRel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude. And of course, we cover how you can play your part and give back to open source.

So we love Hacktoberfest. We've silently participated. Jared, you've done some stuff with it just by happenstance, I guess. You got a t-shirt. I got it. Oh, yeah. I personally haven't yet, but each year we're silently, you know, in the wings of DigitalOcean cheering this thing on because clearly we have a heart for open source. Daniel, you're here and you've been leading this thing.

I think what's interesting is that you were part of the team that started it. So maybe give us the beginnings, the whys. Why is this in place? Yeah, thanks guys. I mean, DigitalOcean's always been focused on developers and we wanted to build developer communities offline and online. So this one actually came about, we were offline running around different hackathons, university hackathons around the month of September going into October. We were like, what can we build into this? And this is five years ago. We were like, what if we gave away some t-shirts folks at those hackathons and why not around the world

gave back to open source. 50 commits to any GitHub repos and we'll send them a shirt. Pretty DIY. I think it was all just within a blog post. And we got 505. We ended up sending 505 shirts in 2014. And so, you know, back to your question of why. I mean, it's a pretty simple program that's focused on wanting to give something back to the developer community and fusing open source with it. And clearly it's about, you know, raising awareness of open source, maybe even taking some of those prs that are

hanging there or some things that are maybe even on ramps know a lot of a lot of uh open sources about finding contributors and building community and things like that so this is just one more thing to put the focus on the need for contribution and the need to give back to open source not just you know monetarily because that's not what this is about, but in ways that take the technologies and the projects forward, either through updated documentation or legit kind of bigger feature development, things like that. Absolutely. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source. And so what is a celebration? A celebration, you have you have to have involvement and, um, you have to have different members of the community come together to celebrate it. So you're right. Uh, one thing I would add to the fact that it was driving contributions, we're also bringing new

folks to open source people that may have never participated around the world. And so that's been super surprisingly effective. Um, because I love some of the stories and I you know just kind of throw one in here for instance I was talking to Victoria who's in Frankfurt she's organizing a bunch of meetups this year for hacktoberfest she actually got involved last year when she was learning to code in CSS JavaScript now she's a Vue.js developer and last year hacktoberfest was her first foray into open source and now she's a Vue.js developer. And last year, Hacktoberfest was her first foray into open source. And now she's organizing the community. So that's kind of like, you know, things that just are unexpected and awesomely exciting for me about what this has turned into.

Was it always low-class communities the way it is now? Or I mean, has it always been sort of like online and maybe offline? Like now it it's it seems like you're doing things where you're organizing meetups and you even have a media kit which i think is or not a media kit like a a meetup kit or an event kit so to speak has it always been you know both sides where it's either online formed or offline formed the event kit came about three years ago actually and since then we've just continued to invest resources into that area because we continue to see community members coming together offline so um not from the very beginning uh but it's really taken off so we're just trying to support it because we see the community just

taking it from you know they're just doing their own thing and we're just getting out of the way really just supporting them doing whatever they need. And we already have 35 events actually organized for Oktoberfest 2018. And it's, you know, there's a lot. October 1st is just starting, you know? Yeah. So you said first year was 505 shirts. Is that right? Yeah.

505 shirts. Can you give me the, I'm sure we'll go deeper into other stats along the way, but just curious, just to tie a bow on this, you know, what the stats are on shirts across the years, like year one was 505, year two is 2000. I don't know, whatever. Yeah. Year two was 5,700. I was going for 2000. I think it'd be a lot. I can explain. I can explain. That's where GitHub comes in the picture. Okay. Yeah. GitHub really helped us reach a new audience. And that partnership has, you know, okay, so 2016, 10,000. Then 2017, last year, 31,000. So, yeah. Progress in the number of t-shirts.

And, you know, that's our love language is t-shirts, right? You give me a t-shirt, I'll love you forever. Apparently, that's, and, you know, we we're not changing that that's the way it's going to continue to work and the thing that we're seeing other companies do um is actually use that model to get their communities involved sendgrid has really been a pioneer in that sendgrid last year um they were shooting for getting 80 contributors during the month of october they got 625 contributors to SendGrid specific repos. And it's because they worked swag into the offering. They said, all right,

participate in Hacktoberfest, we'll also give you a shirt of ours. And what we're seeing this year is there's already a lot of communities that are ready to go with swag if you participate in the larger Hacktoberfest program, but also as an incentive to contribute to their projects. What is it about developers and swag and t-shirts? Where does the love come from? Because if you look from the outside, you think maybe we can't afford clothing and we really need these t-shirts, but I don't think that's the case.

Yeah, definitely. Developers do not need, I think developers don't need more t-shirts. i don't think that's the case yeah definitely developers do not need uh i think developers don't need more t-shirts i am wrong every time uh we don't need any more but we do want more that thing yes yeah i mean first of all you guys should be answering this question uh i'm what what my sort of educated guess is that a t-shirt you know the point of the t-shirt if the t-shirts didn't have anything on them that wouldn't work what the t-shirts have is a technology a community an idea uh sort of a lifestyle something that you know allows developers to connect with other developers

and have a conversation and sort of you know be at a conference and say, you know, I'm proud to be a part of, you know, X, Y, or Z community through my shirt. So, and Hectorfest, the added aspect to that, I'd say, is like now it's the fifth year. I mean, it's kind of cool to have, to be, it's almost a collector's item at this point. Right. I was going to say that's that, that's vintage collector's item, but also limited, right?

Like you can't get 2018s in 2019 or go back and get 2016s. Like it's a once and done, like you're not going to reprint more. Participate or, and get or no. Exactly. Yeah. So as Adam was talking about at the beginning of the show, I kind of accidentally got a Hacktoberfest shirt. I think 2016 wasn't accidental.

Just, I didn't think that my commits were going to add up or something. I did know what Hacktoberfest was and what was going on, but when the shirt came in the mail, it was, or maybe when the email came, I don't remember the logistics, but I was pleasantly surprised and I still wear it with pride. Maybe how it works, maybe how it's changed. Has it been exactly 50 commits to any open source repo and that's how it's always worked? Maybe just some of the details on the actual program

because I know right now what we're all thinking is, okay, how do I get one of these stinking shirts? I want one. Yeah, it was 50 commits. That was only the first year. The next year,

we decided to shift the methodology completely to pull requests. We thought there was more meaning to that in terms of the contribution and more quality. So the past three years, 2015, 16, 17, it's been four pull requests. This is a good time for me to say we're changing that up this year. It's important. Yeah. It's important to highlight because we're celebrating year five. So what do you think it's going to be?

Five pull requests. You got it. Yeah. I'm right here with you. Tracking. I like it. So does that mean pull requests opened, pull requests merged? What's the exact requirements?

Now, the exact requirement is, you know, you have to open up for five pull requests. You know, if they're merged, that's fantastic. That's something that is an added layer of complexity that we've not explored yet. We have these conversations internally around, well, what if we switch it up and do this? And, you know, this thing would actually make for more quality. But it's got these other issues. I mean, there's a lot of different things we could do, and I'd love your guys' input on that too. Just to keep it simple, open five pull requests and get a shirt.

Within the month of October, 1st to 31st, all time zones included. That's become an issue. That's been an issue in the past where folks from these far off time zones are like, am I going to get a chance to complete? And we're like, we got you covered to all the folks in Fiji.

I'm thinking about also the tech required to track this. Is it simply just some GitHub API stuff and it's fairly simple or is it a lot more than that to actually track the validity? Because somebody can eventually gain this somehow and I'm sure someone has or will and that's on them. But are you concerned about that? Yes and no to your question about the actual tooling behind it. It is just GitHub API

wizardry. Pretty simple, but then the magic stuff comes in when we add things like the invalid tag. The invalid tag was introduced two years ago to give maintainers the power to see pull requests that are really

not good stuff. Like, don't come around here with that. You're clearly wasting my time, and you're not getting back in a meaningful way. And that gives maintainers the power to tag things as invalid. So that's obviously something that we count and consider. We have to, you know, the whole time zone stuff actually does add a bit of complexity sometimes.

But in the most part, yeah, it's just counting five pull requests. And I think you bring up a good question about gaming the system. There's a few things. I think there's three things that come to mind that we've done. Because I think that folks that game the system are going to continue to try to game the system. But we've learned why some people do it and we've sort of shifted the program in these three ways one the invalid tag which i just mentioned allowing maintainers to mark issues uh invalid has been pretty powerful uh two no longer focusing on just

like a few repos we used to just promote repositories on the website. Now, instead, we rotate repos so that, you know, all the attention isn't going to just a few select projects, which are just getting bombarded. Instead, it's really just evening it out and letting everyone have a chance to shine on the Hacktoberfest site. And the other thing that we're introducing this year, the third thing is values, Hacktoberfest values. And those are coming from the community. And those are really guiding principles that we've seen the community lead by, you know, that's, it's not us coming up with it. It's something I continue to see in the feedback and the experiences that we see. And so I think that when the community has values and principles guided by that community,

I think there's more of a level of accountability around focusing on quality and caring about one another and, you know, celebrating open source in a meaningful way. I think it's sad, but it's also makes total sense that people would actually game a system in order to win or earn a t-shirt, right? Because like it goes back to the pride point of like we wear you associate yourself with this thing when you're wearing a t-shirt and so it says something about you and so you're you're you're you're you're gaming a system to wear a t-shirt for a thing that you didn't like legitimately earn it just seems like backwards to me but as a developer and somebody who likes to poke and prod at the rules of systems i definitely understand the desire to be like, hmm, what's the minimum I can do to get myself one of these t-shirts?

And still be valid-ish. The ish part, you know? Yeah, exactly. Ish. I mean, that's why we make the rules really simple and kind of paste them all. You know, they're all over the place. They're in the email that we confirmation email. They're on the website.

They're, you know, like that's really front and center. And at the same time, the usual people don't read the instructions and, you know, send us an email and ask us what's going on. But, you know, there's just certain things, certain ways that the community operates that you guys have just, you know, even just shared from your personal experiences that we're not going to change. Uh, and we're just going to have to embrace. Well, it's funny that i mentioned that because quick shout out to beardicus who's a member of the change log community slack brian boucheron

who works for y'all as a technical writer he was talking about uh hacktoberfest in our slack recently and even in there i started asking him like specific rules like okay so if i if i commit to my own open source repository but i open a pull request for myself, does that count? Just trying to figure out where are the edges of this system. And we had a fun time kind of discussing what does or does not count. I could see where. As developers, that just

tendency of being like, where are the boundaries of this technically? And how does it exactly can I poke it in the right way? Definitely happens. Unfortunately, that means y'all got to send a t-shirt to somebody who might not have earned it. this technically and how does it exactly can i poke it in the right way um definitely happens unfortunately that means y'all gonna send a t-shirt to somebody who might not have earned it so also if it's simply based on pull requests there's a lot of pull requests opened uh and not merged on github on collective repos that are open source you know just by nature you know sure

so having you know the budget alone to cover 30 000 shirts last year i mean that's 30 000 50 it was 30 000 last year okay but we're expecting 50 this year that's real money right there that's a lot of money i mean the average i'm just doing the back of the napkin here average shirt cost if you're getting them in that kind of quantity it's probably pretty low plus you probably have relationship with the printer. So maybe eight to 10 bucks plus shipping worldwide. That's still a decent budget just on t-shirts. Well, you guys, you know that when you go

on the Hacktoberfest site today, now that we've launched, you could see who we have as our partners in this. And we're really lucky to have amazing partners like GitHub and Twilio this year to actually help chip in to companies that have similar values and a focus on developers and open source. And so we're not doing it all alone. That's that, you know, that that'll keep that would keep me up all night. That's what you know, that's, yeah, but you're still right. You're still

everything you're saying is absolutely right. And if you did the nap, I didn't want to let you keep going with the napkin math because I would have been, I would have been freaking out over here because I don't want to be reminded of how much it costs to ship 50,000 shirts to last year, 121 countries. How awesome is that? That's a, oh my goodness. Well, let's do it differently then. Let's say since you came at it from that angle, you know, if others didn't step up for this good cause that definitely influences open source and provides future careers for some or on ramps for many. You know, if you had to go alone at your own dollar, sure, DigitalOcean, this, you guys are great. But at some point, you probably have to cut your budget off and say, we just can't do it this year because it's just so expensive. Would that have happened?

If I didn't secure partners, I think we would have shifted the mechanics of the program to limit the amount of shirts that we can give out and figure out other ways to reward community members. Of course, another option that we were considering is having the program be self-funded. And, you know, a great program that existed before Hacktoberfest and still powers on is 24 pull requests. And, you know, that's also a really effective, meaningful program giving back to open source. That's sort of community organized and community central, you know, community organizes the thing. DigitalOcean, I would say, kind of pushes Oktoberfest forward. But at this point, the community could do it on its own. So I think it's interesting looking into, you know, how this year goes, what the lessons are going to be, and going into next year.

Yeah, we've actually covered 24 Report Requests a couple years back, right in the December timeframe too. And it was a lot of fun talking through that with Andrew Nesbitt and just the sheer weight of that and its impact. And I was going to ask you about other models similar to that. I can't recall if you came first or they came first. It's not really a matter of who did, but just how what you learn contributes back to other programs similar to this or if if there's any communication at all we honestly haven't had a whole lot of communication it's more about cross promotion i think that's what it's been

centered around and the model of through these two programs the model is pretty evident what works. So I have some pretty awesome news to share. We are now partnered with Algolia. If you've ever searched Hacker News, Teespring, Medium, Twitch, or even Product Hunt, then you've experienced the results of Algolia's search API. And as we expand our content, we knew that one day we'd have to either roll our own search solution on top of Postgres, or we could partner up with Algolia. And I'm happy to report that phase one of our search is now powered by Algolia. We're able to fine tune our indexing, gain insights from search patterns and analytics. We can create custom query rules to influence

ranking behavior, as well as improve our search experience by adding synonyms and alternative corrections to queries. Sure, we could build search ourselves, but that would mean we would be busy doing that instead of shipping shows like you're listening to right now. Huge thanks to our friends at Algolia for working with us. Check the show notes for a link to get started for free or learn more by how to get involved. Of course, the emphasis is on community, and you said even bringing new folks to the open source community. But when it comes to Hacktoberfest, you have a lot of different perspectives or angles that you could come at participation.

You could say, I strictly want a t-shirt. How am I going to earn a t-shirt? We talked about that a little bit. You could be a maintainer of an open source repository and you would love those extra commits this month. Maybe you're a business, like you mentioned, SendGrid getting involved with their own t-shirts. So from these different perspectives,

give us some information on the best ways to go about participating. Yeah, let's split it up into five. That's what comes to mind for me. One beginner, two contributor, three community organizer, four maintainer, and five business. How does that sound? Repeat it back to me one more time

because you were ready for that and I wasn't. Beginner. Beginner, contributor. Okay. Maintainer, community organizer, and business. Adam, can you tell he's thought about these things before? I actually just came up with that list. He's on the fly.

This is nice. You're good at this. All right, let's go. I wanted to package it for you guys. So the first thing is beginners. Beginners hear about Hacktoberfest to their friends, and they want a t-shirt. That sounds exciting.

Let's get a t-shirt. And what do we And wait, what? We have to do open source, GitHub, Git? What is this stuff? And so beginners actually, while it seems, I think it can come off as kind of intimidating, but there's been so much great content, there's so much community involvement,

and there's so much past experience within the Hacktoberfest community that beginners actually have a lot of routes they could take to get a foot in the door and participate in hacktoberfest if if they stay committed throughout the month because i do hear stories of folks who are like oh like got my first pull request oh no it's suddenly it's october 29th it's like, okay, it's too late. I'm not going to get it. That's why I encourage beginners to really stay in it and do the upfront hard work of learning how to get up and running with Git and GitHub and starting to search, learn how to find opportunities to

contribute and seek out meetups to participate in and look for friends who are talking about it on Twitter. I mean, there's a lot of ways to work your way to getting a shirt. And it's really rewarding is what I've seen. As I told the story of Victoria, another story that comes to mind is Aditya, who was just getting started with open source through Oktoberfest and Fast Forward is now a maintainer of Homebrew Cask because that's a project that he was passionate about and started from contributor to maintainer. So beginners, go for it. And there's a lot of exciting things down the road. And it's worth it. It also helps that I'm a big fan of Cask.

I use it all the time. It also helps. I mean, just saying. I mean, it's such a, I mean, now I can appreciate the maintainership of that project even more because of its roots. You know what I mean? Like, that's so cool that that's how it, you know, maybe that's not the only thing that got that person there. But, you know, it was a beginning. It was a start.

It was a place that there was an on-ramp, which is what we look for in open sources, those on-ramps, those invitations. Right. Well, while we're on beginners, let me give my pitch to potential beginners who want that T-shirt. Okay? We have two repos on the changelog organization. One is called transcripts, and the other is called show notes. Neither of them have code in them. They all have markdown files. There are open source transcripts and show notes, and they're integrated into our CMS. And as I like to say, we have the fastest merge

button in the West. Pretty, although I guess merging doesn't really matter in this case, because the opening of the PR is what matters. That being said, you're still going to contribute very quickly. And so if you want to get involved and you are afraid or intimidated by the coding side of pull requests and contribution into the community, well, find non-code contributions that you can do, which will still get you pull requests. And our repos are easy and awesome.

And hey, you get to listen to ChangeLog shows while you're contributing. How cool is that? I like the pitch. I And hey, you get to listen to ChangeLog shows while you're contributing. How cool is that? I like the pitch. I mean, because you can easily go to pretty much any show on our site and go to the transcript and just look for unintelligible. Or just go to the transcript repo and do a find by and look for unintelligible. And then go listen to that show, even to that point in the show. I'm over-selling it, sorry.

But this is how easy it gets. That's how easy it gets. Anyways, I won't over-sell. Daniel, now you'll find the real reason why we invited you on. And so we can pitch our listeners on helping out on our transcripts. No, just kidding. The thing is, though, is that that's helped out our transcripts so much because they're very readable and they're very, you know, very inviting. And it's just, it's so nice because people can actually, you know, read the show versus just listen to it.

And for those who prefer that method, it's just like you've helped level up. It's nice. I love it. I mean, if you guys, you guys are pitching the program that DigitalOcean created five years ago, it's amazing. So thank you for doing that. And I think it's a perfect time to talk about contributors who you know are experienced contributors right because you guys are shouting out beginners but you guys are okay with non beginners right oh absolutely absolutely cool perfect so yeah contributors the best thing to

do is really you know uh go on github and search uh and just like start to spend time on GitHub throughout October, jumping in and finding using GitHub search to find issues that are related to things that you're interested in. You know, one route you can go take is think about the technologies that you're using on a regular basis or that you've come to love through your experience contributing those. That's a really a natural sort of first step for you to jump into. If projects aren't coming to mind when that prompt comes up, just go on GitHub and maybe go by,

search by the language that you are predominantly using. Or once again, the search functionality is just super effective in just like looking through a whole lot of different types of contributions you can make and i think that what we saw last year is things were getting uh labeled hektoberfest and contributors were jumping in minutes later i mean it was really amazing to see. So contributors, you might have some competition out there. That's why I recommend jumping in and sort of block some time off and jump in throughout October. And I'm sure you'll find something meaningful to contribute back to. And not only, as you guys said yourselves, not only through code, but also through documentation

and, you know, through testing and other, you know, I mean, you guys just called it out yourselves. You guys weren't necessarily pushing for code. So that's great. Right. No questions there. That sounds all good. Yeah.

Move us on to maintainers now, because that's a different perspective altogether. Yeah. And on the flip side of that, maintainers will benefit from actually labeling their different issues, Hacktoberfestfest and doing so strategically. At first, when we introduced the recommendation to label your issues Hacktoberfest, that was a really good move because

it allowed contributors to find issues with ease. Now what we're seeing is there's actually a lot of... Last year, 240,000 pull requests to 64,000 repos. That's the activity that happened in Hacktoberfest 2017. So think about 20, 240,000 pull requests. Smart thing to do for maintainers is to add specificity to the labeling strategy for the different issues. So is

it a first timtimer's welcome? Do you want to talk about the, you know, the time investment that it's going to take or the difficulty level? Things like that allow the community of contributors to jump in and self-identify and connect with these issues in a way that's actually going to get, you know, things done. And the other thing I would say to maintainers is don't necessarily label everything at the beginning of October. It's October 1st. It's important to already have some issues labeled now. However, don't worry about getting everything in there right now.

You can spread that out throughout the month too because different things will pop up at different times. So we found that that has worked for maintainers. So does the, and I might have missed this, you might have said it, do the issues with the Hacktoberfest label, are those aggregated and listed on the Hacktoberfest website? Or is it simply to indicate to people who may want to contribute that you have some good ones? Or are you actually aggregating those and having like a discoverable list yeah we have a discoverable list on the website right when you

land on the site uh and every time you refresh the page you'll get new ones uh so this is before october 1st so some some timing to mention for listeners we're recording this beforehand obviously so currently this site doesn't represent what it will represent on October 1st, which is, I'm assuming the coming soon means this kind of stuff will come when October 1st hits. Thank you for explaining my ignorance here, Adam.

We are looking at a splash page, which by the time this airs will be a much better or much more informative page with that stuff. So that's why I don't know the answer to that. Even though if you're at the website, you probably know that already. Yes, that's absolutely right guys.

Insider baseball here. Okay. I could have also told you, I could have also told you that. All good. All good. I like the motivation for maintainers though, because they're always looking for ways to find more help,

right? Like there's no maintainer out there that is going to turn away somebody you know join the community but then just help taking on the burden of the project in any way shape or form right no one's going to take that away so having something like like hacktoberfest for maintainer must just be like yes i give people a reason to want to get involved even if it's just for a few weeks, you know, let's say you add a hundred maintainers to, or a hundred contributors to a project and five of them stay and actually become long time, you know, sustained contributors

or community members or, you know, some percentage, like it's a win. Yeah. It's a win for maintainers as long as they don't have their wedding or their you know their baby's coming or something really important in your life is happening in october that's right you know make it double duty why is no one planning around this i mean that's what i'm doing i'm planning my life out people october is taken okay it's october fest no life events allowed and what about community organizers what's what's their here? Similar to maintainers, community organizers are hungry to build community online, offline. And Hacktoberfest, because of the offline piece, Hacktoberfest has become a time when

there's this real demand for coming together and hacking away at open source. And community organizers are leveraging that to bring their local communities together. For instance, Adam, who actually works at DigitalOcean, has been a Hacktoberfest community member before he joined DigitalOcean. He told me a couple of days ago that they've got 30 people signed up for the Edmonton, Alberta meetup. And that's more people that showed up to their meetup last year. And I don't think that, you know, it's not to say that, you know, I don't know how much they push their community throughout the year, but that's certainly an

indication that something, something is bringing people together that, yeah, I don't know how to, I don't even know how to describe it. I mean, it's, it's really just a hunger for coming together. And last year, 119 meetups were organized around Hacktoberfest. And this year, I'm honestly expecting over 200 around the world. Wow, that's spectacular. I mean, one question I have, which kind of relates to the maintainers and the community organizers, and Daniel, you may or may not have insights or tips on this. So feel free to just say, I'm not sure but um when we have like an influx of what you might call casual contributors or people who you know their main motivation is for the t-shirt or

um they're just getting started and so we have i don't want to call them low quality or low value contributions but let's just call them casual because i think that's probably what they are as a maintainer the real value comes kind of like what Adam said over time. If you get, you know, long-term contributors, right? So you're introducing, hopefully, a casual contributor to eventually become somebody who's going to contribute repeatedly. It seems like for maintainers and community organizers, specifically more maintainers, but also organizers, it would be nice to have or to help out somehow with resources or knowledge you actually convert them from casual to repeated like are there tried

and true methods how do you guys do it we'd be nice we welcome we thank yeah um we have talk about the the thing we did from kent c dodds jared that's a pretty interesting thing the contributor uh section to read me yeah so we use the all contributors spec and command line tool that KenCDodds came up with, which is a way to basically provide shout outs or credit to all the contributors towards your project right there in the readme. And so there's a grid in your readme, which has everybody's avatars and little emoji representing how they contributed. So that includes non-code contributions as well as code contributions. And so we use that and it works very well

for smaller projects. I think any project like Kubernetes couldn't do that, right? Because they have 7,000 or however many thousand people who are contributing. And so it wouldn't really scale very well. But that's good for small projects. You know, we give people, we thank people on Twitter. We show that it matters to us our projects aren't the things that we really seek a contribution

on are our transcripts and show notes we also have our changelog.com website which is open source and we've had some great contributions there um but we aren't necessarily trying to i don't know i'm trying to build like a a base of core contributors i guess i mean for transcripts we definitely would but yeah we'd just be nice and give shout outs and and show people that it that it helps and that it matters and that we that we appreciate it but beyond that yeah i don't have hard answers either one place they could go to for more resources however which is you know no longer an show, but a great resource in retrospect and is a lot of greenfield kind of content,

is Request for Commits, the show we had with Nadia Ekbal and Michael Rogers, who did a show on exploring different perspectives in open source, sustainability, you know, the human side of code. It was one of the taglines for the show, essentially. It went 20 episodes, episodes 19 episodes over two seasons plenty of content in there for you know contributor on ramping how to fund your open source all these

different things of being a maintainer essentially but how to you know how to attract and keep and and nurture a community of involved people in a project and or idea so i would say that just to add one more thing to the resource pack would be request or commits as a podcast listen to episode 1 through 19 and that's essentially open source 101 and building on that nadia developed i believe that she was the one that worked on github's open source guides which are a phenomenal resource which we link to from the Hacktoberfest site. And I love how you brought up Michael Rogers, who, if he's listening. It was intentional.

Hey, Michael. Because Michael was at DigitalOcean when we started Hacktoberfest. I bet. I bet. I remember that because I first met Michael in the time whenever he worked at DigitalOcean. This was when I had just fork happened. And I was like, how in the world do you do your job at DigitalOcean and help lead this fracture and then re-governance of Node? And then obviously he quit DigitalOcean a couple months later, not because of the like or dislike for the work, but just moving on

in his career. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to think, I realized I didn't add one aspect of the community uh, community organizer piece and that's the event kit, which is a tool. So we talked about the maintainer, the tools that allow maintainers to bring folks from, um, you know, these casual contributors to, uh, ongoing and consistent, uh, core contributors for the events, for the event side of things, we have an event kit that we developed two years ago. And that's been a collaboration between my colleague, Samantha C, and GitHub's Joe Nash,

who runs their university programs. And the event kit has just been phenomenal at giving folks a template of how to put together an event and how to make it an awesome event. And what I'm seeing is communities are actually organizing for the second or third year in a row Hacktoberfest events. So that's telling me that something is working. And Samantha and Joe are really active this year. They're actually going to be releasing some webinars and there's going to

be a video on the site you should see in the event kit section that's going to show you how to just a Q&A with them and them providing an overview of how to put together an event yourself. So also a helpful resource for the community organizer side of things. Is there a list of community driven events anywhere then that I missed or will it appear whenever the first hits and then there then there's some, you know, some information more so for like, Hey, there's, I'm in Houston, Texas, and somebody has already started this. You don't have to begin from scratch. You could just join up. Oktoberfest, uh, slash events. Uh, so that's on, it's going to be a separate page on the site.

And that answer, you know, it's going to be just go to slash events and you're going to see all the events that are happening around the world. And in there, you can also submit an event. And that's added to the list. So that's that's the place I'm going to be looking for. You see how I dropped the number 200. Let's see. Let's connect after October and see how close I was to that prediction.

Because a lot of this, you know, you're you're it's like, well, Daniel, shouldn't you know exactly what the results of this are going to be? And shouldn't this be a data-driven program? Well, yes, but there's also aspects of this that are really hard to predict. Like we're going to be giving out 50,000 shirts this year and I'm predicting 200 events around the world. I don't know if that's what's going to actually happen. So I'm going to be interested to connect with you guys and see if that's, you know, see how close we were. Maybe we could do like a mini so in november jared and just do a hacktoberfest catch up of that'd be fun a little break or something like that and do that because that'd be cool because i love making predictions one to motivate but then two just to try to predict the future and see how close we were and as you know jare we're sometimes close but dean i gotta feel like you might be a little closer. I also said 50,000, that'd be a great number. And 200 events around the year

would be around that time around the world would be great too. Yeah. And a big driver of all this is the last of the five ways into Oktoberfest and that's the businesses. Well, tell us about that, that piece there. We're really curious because you mentioned that had it not been for this, that, you know, you had to find potentially a change of model if you didn't have other businesses. Do you mean at this level or do you mean businesses in general, uh, being involved? Yeah. It's interesting that you just made me think that, you know, that both, both are true because I think the more businesses we can get involved in Hacktoberfest, the, the more Hacktoberfest could thrive. Which is a bit counterintuitive because it seems like it's just a community-driven program,

developers around the world celebrating open source. Well, who is in these businesses? Who is building these software and hardware companies? It is developers. And that's why it's been really great to see companies like SendGrid, or for instance, I don't know, you may have heard of this company that's participating this year, Microsoft, participating in Hacktoberfest,

which is helping us drive more involvement because they have their communities that they're bringing into the fold. And their reason for doing it is a really great reason. They want more contributions to open source. And that's why we do the whole thing. So everyone's missions are aligned here. We're all on the same page. And that's what makes it really exciting. You know, SendGrid, I mentioned them earlier. I mean, their statistics, they were, they got 43 pull requests in October 2016. They got 1,249 in 2017. That's a 2,800%00 increase um you know i thought it was like i thought i

wanted to quote them and share what they said they were said it's important to emphasize how completely taken by surprise we all were by this activity we added some issues we sized them and tagged them appropriately and then people just kept completing them. Sometimes the same issue at the same time and often in ways we couldn't predict, but that were awesome. And so that's where I sort of push for this business side of things because I really think that any business

who has an open source component can benefit from this. This episode is brought to you by Raygun, who just launched their APM service. It was built with the developer and DevOps in mind. They're leading with first-class support for.NET apps, also available as an Azure app service, and have plans to support.NET Core followed by Java and Ruby in the near future. After doing a ton of competitive research between the current APM providers, where Raygun APM excels is the level of detail they're surfacing. New Relic and AppDynamics, for example, are more business

oriented, where Raygun has been built for developers and DevOps. The level of detail provided in the traces are amazing, the flame charts are awesome, and allows you to actively solve problems and dramatically boost your team's efficiency when diagnosing problems. Deep dive into root cause with automatic links back to source for an unbeatable issue resolution workflow. Learn more and get started at raygun.com. Once again, raygun.com. so dan you were talking about businesses getting involved there's different angles here you got centigrade which you can quote obviously lots of cool stuff happening there i'm sure a close

relationship because of this lots of small businesses getting involved that are seeing benefits from the impact of hacktoberfest and just the the the sheer inertia of what a t-shirt can do to a developer's motivation uh what else you got i know you got microsoft you mentioned they threw in their hat i'm not sure what the involvement is can you walk us through more of the business side of things, either SendGrid or Microsoft, and what's happening there? Yeah, I mean, the model, I can't say that SendGrid were the first to come up with a model of, hey, participate in Hacktoberfest, and we're going to have our own Hacktoberfest community, you know, sort of structure around SendGrid-specific

repos and the issues there because a lot of open source projects have done that and projects that have participated Exorcism and Rust and Laravel and OpenShift by Red Hat

and Jenkins and Ember I mean, a lot of those communities were using this model of, hey, we're going to, within our community, within our contained community, we're going to give back a sticker, some swag, if you participate within this larger Hacktoberfest program. SendGrid is just one of the businesses that jumped on board and has had success, and they're continuing to do that. And that's why I'm sort of pushing in a way I'm sort of sharing that story because I'd love to see other businesses get

involved and reach out. And, you know, it really is a win-win for everyone. So I'm, I'm overselling it now, but clearly the oversell, the overselling, the overselling, whether it's, it's whatever it is, there's, you know, Microsoft is participating this year with that same model. Microsoft is encouraging open source contributors to participate in their repos, and they're going to give a shirt. And I think one thing, is it Ashley McNamara that's going to design the shirt? I mean, how awesome would that be? I think that's what they're doing. So clearly the pitching is working or the program itself is pitching the whole thing

for me, really. And yeah, so that's the business piece. I'm not going to get into the other side of it too much, but I'm just surprised that more companies aren't using Hacktoberfest internally as a tool to encourage their engineers to have more time to hack on open source. I think maybe that's like the next frontier. Let me sell it with you too, because what I like about the SendGrid example is that they were surprised. And I think what you will find as we collectively, and I'm going to use the words of a recent podcast we were on with Donald Fisher of Tidelift. He said, we have collectively decided as a just humanity have decided to build our future on technology. And that technology is largely built on open source. And so that's the truth. That means that what we're seeing here applies to a wide majority of businesses.

Everything from My Local Grocer, H-E-B here in Houston, Texas, ginormous whatever here in Texas, just like Texas is, you know, they are a technology business. Like every business is involved in technology and parts of their businesses are open source source SDKs, easy ways, whatever. But the cool thing I think about Syncret is that they were surprised by and then they found ways to benefit from it to, one, encourage more, but then also to just widen their community. They use it as marketing in a lot of ways. Successfully.

And I think this is just an open door. If your business is at all influenced or whatever by open source, this is an opportunity to just get in the digital ocean shadow and do some of this stuff with Hactoberfest. It's just a loss if you don't plan for

this. That's what I would think. We're going to do some stuff this year, too. We're still working on some fun ways to do some stuff, but this podcast is just one way that we're going to get involved and throw our hat into the, into the ring and do some fun stuff. So, I mean, I'm going to sell it with you. I think it's, if you're a business that relies on open source or built in technology, get involved, find a way. Is there any previews that you're aware of? I know Ashley's done designing the t-shirt for Microsoft. Have you seen it? Do you care to know about it as organizers of this? Is this

something that you're like, let's see the t-shirt. What's it look like? Do you get involved in those levels with, you know, like this is an unofficial involvement, right? It's not like they said, Hey, did ocean, can we participate? They just did it. We have brand guidelines on the Hector fest site that we encourage communities to use. They've actually been really helpful for community organizers who don't want to take the time to create yet another event poster. And so we've done the work for you, community organizers. Just go on the, just find the event kit and in there you'll find the community guidelines, which will allow you to

leverage the Hacktoberfest branding for your communities and projects. So if you do get involved, you do have to tie in the collective Hacktoberfest branding somehow. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I won't get involved then. I'm just kidding.

That's cool. I didn't, I wasn't thinking that, but that's actually a good thing on your part too, because one, you're just making sure that where it began and that, that Hacktoberfest, the brand is there not so much DigitalOcean, the brand. I'm assuming that's the case at least. Yeah. The focus is to continue to bring it back to, to have a sort of unified front so that we're all working together on this so that Hacktoberfest has to grow. I mean, that's really the reason for this, is we want folks, when they're sharing Hacktoberfest to their friends, they're all talking about the same Hacktoberfest. And for us, that's really important on a branding aspect as well. DigitalOcean really cares about branding. It's something that we've been

baked into the simplicity of our mission. And we care a lot about branding. We care a lot about design. And part of the creating a simple cloud experience for developers is creating a visually simple experience that's enjoyable as well. So that's, I guess, that's one of the things that DigitalOcean

has carried over into Hacktoberfest and how we execute the program. Yeah. So for those curious, inside this kit is vector files, PDFs for the guidelines, the computer itself, which is sort of like the core visual piece, the word Hacktoberfest. You have not only PNG, but also vector level versions. So if you really want to take it far and do like a gigantic poster, you can. You know, you got the full working files, not just web friendly. You know, it's print friendly, too, which is cool. Let's talk about since we're on this kick of branding, how important it is to be visually appealing. You know, even maybe even t-shirt quality uh i'm a i'm a i know jared is because he loves our t-shirt but we personally as jeans while we print our t-shirts on american apparel

tri-blend t-shirts we do tri-black they're super comfortable super comfy and my relatives who support me in my business and our business and what we do, they would wear it anyways. But because it's super comfy, they're like, please give me a T-shirt and one for my friends, too, because they're super comfortable. So tell me more about the T-shirts themselves and maybe how important it is to be visually appealing and be on brand or just the branding nature of this. Yeah, I talked about the branding side a little bit and the importance to have a consistent design experience. And as you can see, the Hacktoberfest design is something brand new, crafted in our design lab year after year. It's something that everyone internally gets really excited about when the new designs come out. I know my co-pilot and partner in this program for many years now, Lee Riley at GitHub, he is always also the excitement builds even more when I share the designs with the GitHub team.

So that's the design side of it. But as you said, the feel of the shirt, that's super important too. I agree with you. I think that a shirt that feels good is going to have more mileage than one that's cheap. And with Hacktoberfest, we want to create the first kind of experience. So we actually are using, are you guys familiar with district tees? Yeah. So we're using it this year.

This is something new. We're doing a district VIT, which I think you guys are really going to enjoy. And we actually had a bunch of samples and we talked to different companies this year to source the different materials. And this is the one that we're feeling really good about. And we've put in the first order, so there's no turning back now. How many samples did you get and who wore them the design team yeah myself and how many samples uh eight nice okay because i've made mistakes before i'd said something well like i didn't try that t-shirt on and in like all the sizes too because gosh it's terrible when you get a 2x it's not a 2x or a small it's not a small and it's like oh that's a bummer it feels good but it doesn't fit yeah that's a constant challenge uh yeah that's you know the

logistics part of hacktoberfest is really uh a a thankless and i'll take this opportunity to thank uh everyone who's involved in actually getting the shirts to all the community members around the world it's you know it's something that starts in october we start shipping them out within october so that folks can celebrate and feel good about completing the challenge in the month that it happens but at the same time you see shirts you know arriving in january uh because they're going all over the world so you know it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. So I appreciate all the patience that the community has with the shirts. And I'm proud of the logistical challenge that we've taken on. And we're making improvements there too because we saw a lot of shirts not make it last year

to certain countries like India, for instance. And we're making improvements in that regard so that we lower the lot of shirts not make it last year to certain countries like India, for instance. And we're making improvements in that regard so that we lower the percentage of unfulfilled orders because we really care about making this work and everyone who earns a t-shirt for them to get one in a timely way. And it's not like doing the work, getting a t-shirt and then not getting it.

And you're like, oh man. But at the same time, you have to realize your business isn't shipping t-shirt and then not getting it and you're like oh man but you know at the same time you have to realize like your business isn't shipping t-shirts your business is a simple cloud and this is something that it seems from this call was a happy accident to some degree like you did it with intention but the success of it may have been the happy accident part and you're not going to quit because hey look at the great things it's doing and you're pulling on partners and find different reasons but you know it's a bummer whenever you're in a place in the world where it's harder to send things with uh without fail and and i i agree it's it's tough and you want to make sure they get their shirts even in italian man like if you if you did october and you got to november and you tallied it up and they didn't get their shirt until march or may of the following year be like not gonna not gonna do it

next year or maybe less likely because like hey i want my t-shirt at least within a relevant time frame how has that changed over the years have you always been this obviously not but i'll have you always been somewhat in a range of near nove-ish of the following month or so in terms of shipping? So the answer is no, initially. No, we first started shipping things out at the end of October. So we would wait for the program to end. We'd tally up all the results and then we'd start shipping in November. So, you know, there you go.

That certainly wasn't desirable in terms of like the quick turnaround, but we changed that. And last year we started shipping out as early as the first week of October. And so that was an improvement. But really, as I said, like the challenge last year was a lot of assurance specifically, and a few countries just have a really hard time getting through customs, and they just don't make it. And so we're using different tactics like drop shipment this year and paying a little bit extra for different fulfillment services so that the percentage of shirts that don't make it actually decreases. We really care about this. So I'd say that's one of the behind the scenes changes that we've made this year. And, you know, once again, repeating the important changes that we made this year is five pull requests and 50,000 shirts. I mean, yeah, I'm talking to you guys is really making me feel

like some community support here because there is, there is a level that there is, it's huge guys. It's really, I was just wondering how big can it possibly go? I mean, cause I'm a couple of years down the road on you now thinking you know in 2020 how many shirts are they going to be shipping out like that do the rules necessarily have to change because there's just like it's a point where the scale becomes a bit ridiculous right or do we just keep on scaling no i agree with you uh i wouldn't say that the scale is is ridiculous it's more about the focus might get lost and that. And that's concerning for me. And that's why I think it's important to have the conversation with the community.

And having you guys involved in that would be really useful. So that sort of we can all come together and just hear out the community on what the different ideas are. Because I think there's a lot of great suggestions out there for building on what we have built together so far. And no suggestion when we come up here would be the best. But I would just say, find a way to do a tiered system. Well, I love how the businesses involved can do their own shirts. And so, I mean, I wouldn't rely upon that as the only way that it works. But it seems like that could maybe offset.

And so it's like, you know, if you do all your PRs to Microsoft repos, then you get a Microsoft shirt. Maybe you don't need the other Hacktoberfest shirt. Again, as Adam said, our ideas, especially on the top of our head, probably aren't the best ideas. So we're happy to be involved in this conversation as it advances.

Undoubtedly, there are lots of ways that you could cut this and some are better than others. At the time, we're also very sympathetic to the, to the shoes you're in and the choice you'll have to make. Yeah. Thanks guys. And based on those suggestions you gave, I don't think I'll be asking you guys. Live on the air.

Thank you. Well, the thing is, you know, that we wanted to, we knew that this was an important thing. For one, it's kept going. And we've been tracking it. And as Jared mentioned, he'd gotten an accidental T-shirt even though it was on purpose or, you know, he earned it, you know. He didn't expect it. it is to get acclimated with open source, get acclimated with Git, GitHub, pull requests, core things that if you want to be a contributor to open source, these are necessary mechanisms to be familiar with.

We're a huge advocate to that. That's what we want. We want to be, for the reason why we have no explicit tag on our podcast is because we want to be what we say future hacker friendly like if you are driving with your children in the car or you're a young adult or a young adolescent you know getting into software and our show is one of the things you use as a lens to look at the world and say this is how software development is happening this is where things are going we want to be welcoming to that so So we want to make sure that, you know, we support you all in this mission. And that's why we want to kind of get on the phone with you and talk through the story and like figure out where it came from,

what the motivations were behind it, who's involved, what the successes are, and more importantly, the impact and how you can get involved. And I think that to me is, is super important. And like you'd said, you know, lost in the mission. It's not about the t-shirts. That's the nice to have. That's sort of the carrot out there.

The important thing is, is open source, understanding it, what's involved in it, the importance it places in our world, the importance that when you pull out your phone, whether it's an Android or an iPhone, it's full of open source,

right? And there's places to get involved and we want to be able to give people the necessary on-ramps to that. And more importantly, support the maintainers and those who are already in the fight, you know, give them, give them the necessary things to, to be invited, to be welcomed, to be appreciated. And that's, I think the thing I would want to take away from this is like, that's what this is. It's a beacon saying, hey, you're welcome here. Whoever you are, by the way, we'll give you a T-shirt. Thank you so much for supporting it.

That was amazing. I could not have said it better myself. I came up with a new idea. See, now you've challenged me. So the rule change that I would suggest next is if you can get a patch committed to the Linux kernel during October, then you get a t-shirt. That would fix your scaling problem, wouldn't it? That would fix it. It would actually limit it quite a bit.

But yes, that's a good one, Jared. Don't discount me, Daniel. I got ideas over here. So let's stay in touch. Like he said, he's not coming to us for the ideas, Jared. We've already shot ourselves in the foot. I'm offended. We're So let's stay in. Like he said, he's not coming to us for the ideas, Jerry. We've already started something afoot. I'm offended. We're the motivators, not the idea makers. I'm offended. You guys are for sure.

And you guys have really been helping carry Hector fest forward with this conversation even more so. So I really appreciate that. Cool. Well, anything in closing, anything happening that we may not have covered anything super secret, any stats else that just was on the table we didn't we didn't get on our list hacktoberfest month-long celebration of open source year five is coming soon so that's that's the only thing i would say is like i think we've covered everything it's it's um just get ready and and hack away. What's the URL?

We never said the URL on this call yet. Is it hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com? Is that the best way? Or is it do.co slash hacktoberfest and then add the year? Hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com. Okay. You heard it here. Don't pull over.

Just earmark that. We do put that in the show notes, so don't worry about that. If you're listening, you know that. Go back to the show notes. We'll put the URL in there. And there you go. So, Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for you and the rest of the team, everyone involved in this. If your name wasn't mentioned here and you work at DigitalOcean or GitHub or any of the collaborating companies that work so hard to make this happen, huge thank you from us in the community. And just keep doing it.

We'll support you how we can. And thank you for the time. Thank you guys. All right. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the change log. Assuming you love this show, do us a favor, go into iTunes,

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