Hacktoberfest 2017 Was Amazing

We went into Hacktoberfest this year with our eyes open, hoping that we would hand out 75 shirts to contributors who helped us close out some of our API library and docs issues.

Last year, we had 43 contributors and were super excited to have the insights, expertise, and contributions from these amazing people.

DigitalOcean and GitHub both doubled their numbers from last year. They reported on the official Hackotberfest site that they had 31,842 people who opened 4 or more Pull Requests (PRs) and earned a shirt–38,000 PRs in total, across 64,000 repositories! We realized something special was happening when we had already blown away all of our goals for the month by October 10th.

We saw some amazing things happen in our own repos and we’re so proud to have been a part of and tremendously grateful that they happened.

Over 600 contributors made 1,000 legitimate PRs to SendGrid repos during Hacktoberfest this year!

Saying that we’re overwhelmed by the love and support from our community doesn’t even begin to explain the feels we have right now 💖

To say thank you, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some amazing stories from this past month. These are things that caught our attention, that tickled us, or that just blew us away.

Code of conduct

Contributor @arguiot suggested that we add a code of conduct to our Node.js repo. Our legal team took the suggestion and wrote an amazing code of conduct for all of our repos. We posted issues, and within minutes, we had a code of conduct PRs on all our managed open source repositories.

First timers

We have the honor of merging changes from first-time open source contributors, like @jeffgerlach and @nicolasmdf. Open source contributions can be intimidating for first time GitHub users because you never know how the maintainers will respond. We appreciate the fact that so many new users to GitHub trusted us with their earliest GitHub experiences.

Fall cleaning

Some of the pull requests that made us absolutely smile were from contributors @pushkyn, and @thepriefy who helped us to raise the bar in many of our repositories. Topics including grammar, spelling, structure, organization, README badges were all addressed and no task was too tedious or small.

Nearly none of these things would have hit the top of our backlogs, yet these contributors went in, found them, and absolutely destroyed a ton of these items.

All around awesomeness

We strive to provide a welcoming developer community where people can come to learn, test their skills, and help each other to solve problems.

Open source libraries reduce development time for our customers so that they can start and continue to use SendGrid faster.

When we see our contributors helping each other out, approving code changes, and learning from each other–it really makes our day! There were so many people who helped us share our community, simply by jumping in and helping. Thank you!

There are far too many stories to share here and we are still going through hundreds of PRs and making sure that everyone who contributed this past month gets their well-earned SendGrid Hacktoberfest shirt.

If you are thinking about contributing, don’t wait till next October! We always give contributors a SendGrid shirt, hacker pin and sticker for their first non-Hacktoberfest PR that we merge (even if you got a SendGrid Hacktoberfest shirt in October).