Announcing Hacktoberfest 2017

SendGrid is proud to announce that we are participating in Hacktoberfest 2017. We love our open source community and want to say thanks and provide some interesting challenges—and of course—some awesome swag for people who contribute to our open source repositories this October.

DigitalOcean and Github originally teamed up 4 years ago to create the first Hacktoberfest, an open source community event that aims at knocking out tens of thousands of issues in open source repos during the month of October.

Last year, Hacktoberfest gave out 15,000 shirts and had 92,000 pull requests opened! And we are extremely grateful and proud of the 2016 contributions. We had 43 pull requests and sent swag to 40 contributors. Every single repo had accepted pull requests that added functionality, fixed dependencies, helped the libraries to be more idiomatic to the language (Python is not Java!), added automated testing, and even simplified functionality to save the next developer time and effort.

For more information about Hacktoberfest from DigitalOcean and Github, please visit the official Hacktoberfest page.

How to get swag

Every contributors’ first accepted pull request to a SendGrid repo during October 2017 will be rewarded with a special edition SendGrid Hacktoberfest t-shirt, Hacktoberfest sticker, and a SendGrid Hacker Pin. (You just have to fill out the form from the link we post as soon as the PR is accepted).

Our main library repos, Python, PHP, C#, Java, Ruby, Node, or Go, and or our documentation repo all have issues labeled with #Hacktoberfest and a size. The larger the size of the task, the more points you get on our leaderboard–which will be live on October 1st. We will continue to add items throughout the month as we or our community identify opportunities.

We have a sizeable backlog of features from small to large that we will eventually implement in our libraries. Even though we actively work on our libraries every day we are not able to get everything done. Here are some examples of things that are on our list that could be completed during Hacktoberfest for swag!

• Python: Improved Error Handling – difficulty: easy – Extend current error handling to include better messages and solutions.
• Go: Add Rate Limiting Support – difficulty: hard – Add client library support for v43 Web API rate limits.
• Ruby: Timeout Configuration – difficulty: easy – Add configuration options for connection open and read timeouts.
• Docs: X-Message-ID – difficulty: easy – Describe the X-Message-ID header received from the Event Webhook data.
• Open Source Data Collector: Dockerize – difficulty: medium – Create a Docker container to make deploying and contributing to this repo easier.
• sendgrid-java or sendgrid–php or sendgrid–csharp: Inbound Parse Helper – difficulty: hard to very hard – Create a stand-alone module to help developers get started consuming and processing Inbound Parse data.

Reduce Chattiness

We do expect the repos to be quite chatty during October (they are already very chatty). If you would like to avoid the deluge of notifications and updates that come from watching one of our repos, please sign up to receive only release notes through the library-specific newsletter of your choice. You will only get release notifications, rather than every single comment, issue, and PR that happens!

Thank you

We really appreciate your interest in our efforts to support Hacktoberfest 2017. No matter your expertise with Open Source, we have issues and tasks that you can definitely complete, from small changes to help you get your feet wet, to much bigger, hairier, tasks for people who are looking for a challenge.

Every contributor makes a difference and their contributions matter to us (even if we don’t accept them!!). Please expect to get constructive replies, questions, and suggestions from us and our community members!

Stay tuned for more upcoming information as we get closer to the event and check in our documentation repo. Happy hacking!