Our Hacktoberfest Success Story

If you're a Hacktoberfest contributor, you have built-in metrics for success-four pull requests-but for maintainers, it's a little bit different. You have to decide what success looks like for your projects. We want our contributors to succeed, to grow our projects, and to welcome new community members.

Prior to Hacktoberfest, our OpenSauced team decided what repositories we wanted to opt-in. We wanted to ensure that we had the bandwidth to support contributors at all stages and to create a clear contributor journey that allowed for growth within our open source ecosystem. Making these decisions set us up for a successful Hacktoberfest.

Our Hacktoberfest story isn't just about the present; it's about the future and the relationships that we’ve cultivated over the last month.

Hacktoberfest Repositories

We decided to opt-in eight of our repositories. The repositories we chose represented a path for contributors to move from getting their first-ever Pull Request (PR) to working on more challenging issues.

We had consistent contributions across our repositories throughout the month, seeing an increase across each of our opted-in repos. Our team worked quickly to ensure clear communication and support for submitted PRs and questions on issues, leading to a high rate of PR velocity. As they say, teamwork makes the dream work. Our team's commitment to supporting contributors was exemplified by a PR acceptance rate of over 75% during that time!

You can see all of the repositories, including their activity, PR Overview, velocity, contributors, and more here:

Contributors

During Hacktoberfest, we had consistent contributions that continue today. Some of the highlights include:

• 129 Contributions from external contributors
• 83 Repeat contributors
• 68 New Contributors

Of our new contributors, we saw a lot of activity across our repositories and beyond during Hacktoberfest. It's great to be able to see where our contributors are also spending time to get an idea of their skill level, interests, and specialties.

Outside of OpenSauced, some of the notable projects they contributed to include:

• Facebook Rapid
• GitHub docs
• Appwrite Pink
• freeCodeCamp
• Microsoft autogen

The app repo for OpenSauced, in particular, saw a healthy influx of new and returning contributors.

To find details about your own project using our pizza CLI, run npm i -g pizza in your terminal to install the CLI. Next, run the pizza show command with your repo address: pizza show https://github.com/open-sauced/app. To find out what other commands you can run and more installation options, check out the pizza-CLI repo.

Highlights

One of the great parts of seeing our contributors progress through the month was seeing what they were most proud of through their highlights. We had 112 highlights during that time, including blog posts, issues, and PRs. It’s great to be able to share in our contributors' stories.

Through the highlights, we saw people making their first Hacktoberfest contributions, adding test coverage, working on features, fixing bugs, adding community health files, creating issues to invite a new group of contributors to join in, and more.

One of the best parts of Hacktoberfest is seeing new contributors grow throughout the month and continue to make meaningful contributions. When we started our Hacktoberfest at OpenSauced, we encouraged contributors to look beyond the green squares, and it’s been great to see this reflected this year through collaboration, growth, and continued contributions. We’ve had an increase in new contributors, a growing enthusiasm of those outside our core team, and contributors supporting our team by triaging, creating issues, and reviewing pull requests.

What's Next?

We believe in making the OpenSauced experience great for everyone who uses it and all our contributors. We welcome continued contributions, including issues, bug reports, pull requests, blog posts written about your OpenSauced experience, and your feedback. If you want to learn more about how to use OpenSauced to see how your projects are doing, check out our Introduction to OpenSauced or get started today.