October has arrived meaning that one of my favourite hackathons is back, the Hacktoberfest! During this one month long hackathon engineers everywhere get together to support open-source software and earn cool swag by opening pull requests to their favourite projects.

I try to participate every year, doing so in a way that both contributes to the software I use daily and provides me with an opportunity to learn, discover and grow in ways that I may not in in my day to day work.

For what it’s worth, here is a handful of the projects or organizations that I’m going to be trying to contribute to throughout the month (and beyond!)

Jenkins

I’ve very switched gears and moved to Cloudbees, my first day was today! Part of what I’ll be working on is of course Jenkins and unsurprisingly Jenkins is an avid supporter of Hacktoberfest with a vast array of projects that can be contributed to. I won’t go into too much detail of how you could support Jenkins, there’s already a very well done blog post on just how you could do that.

I’m hoping that being able to dive into a couple of different areas of Jenkins will give me a great understanding on how it’s built, put together and how I can help bring Jenkins into the modern age.

Anything Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the orchestration system that everybody is involved with. It’s become a defacto standard for ‘cloud’ and I’ve fallen in love with it, so much so that I’ve had to pull myself back a few times and ask if Kubernetes is even the right answer. It isn’t always.

That said, almost everything Kubernetes is opensource and available for us as engineers to pitch in on, including what I’d consider supporting tooling such as Helm!

Anything Microsoft

Microsoft has come a long way recently, it’s switch to OSS has been tremendous and they’re doing great things. They’re not only looking for contributions to their opensource projects but are putting money where their mouth is and providing an additional cool t-shirt for anybody who contributes anything to one of their projects! I love free swag.

Be sure that you sign their CLA and complete this form if you’re wanting to grab that cool microsoft shirt.

Back to posts