I was thinking something about your past experience and why you think people should participate, but it could really be whatever you want. What is it, why do you think it’s worth participating, how did you get started, what does it typically look like, what is a quality pull request, then how do they get started at the end.

What is Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is a event run by stewards of open source to encourage contributing to projects that are also open source.

Why participate in Hactoberfest

• The more able you have your community, the more that community can contribute.

• When you have that, you can help any number of open-source projects.

• There's a free t-shirt. We're all very well paid, but this shirt will convince most of you.

Okay now that your convinced (if you're not see the third bullet, it's, um enticing).What kinds of contributions do you have to make for this? GitHub focuses on "Quality contributions". What does that mean? Does this solve a problem or issue on the project, sounds good to me.

What is a quality pull request

I'd wager anything is meaningful. That could be something as simple as cleaning up the CONTRIBUTORS.md file to something as complex as adding an integration to read the public Known Errors out of ServiceNow.

How did I get started

Why did I start doing the Hacktoberfest events? For me, it's all about doing something, anything. Hacktoberfest started in 2013. I didn't know about it until 2016. I'm pretty sure I got the shirt that year, but I can't find the evidence.

Do you want to get more familiar with git? Do you want to learn something new? Great, nothing like Hacktoberfest to push you into something. That's my take on it.Git can be confusing. Heck, I still have problems. I'd never had done it without something to do.

I try learning something every October with this event. This year my focus is Now Components.

How do you get started?

Find an open-source project you'd like to contribute to. I know I've had some.

Here's a short list of projects I'd suggest looking at;

• Slacker on SNDevs, you know you want to make this better.

• Libra is a toolkit of utilities to use on development instances.

• NowComponents Catalog of open source Now Components for the Now Experience.

• Cajunbot on Discord (used on the unoffical ServiceNow Discord)

• ServiceNow News Aggregetor See it in action here news.jace.pro

• ServiceNow Version Tracker

• Workflow is tool to visualize diagrams in a markdown like text where there's also some standard flows

If none of those stand out, here's the link to issues from the official site

What does it typically look like

Most projects follow the "GitHub Flow".

• Find an issue, comment on it to claim it.

• Fork the repository

• Clone the repository

• Create a branch

• Make the changes to address the issue

• Commit the changes to your fork's branch

• Push your changes to your fork's branch

• Open a Pull Request

• Answer questions by the project maintainer and help where you can get the work accepted

That seems like a lot but really it isn't that much. Generally, that's as complicated as it gets.

I'd love to see more folks contribute to the groups I watch. (I'm looking at 8000 strong from SNDevs Slack, and you smaller Discord community).

There's great content on Dev.to about starting from nothing.

Go contribute

Add text here about contributing or creating a project.