Hacktoberfest is an annual program administered by Digital Ocean with an aim to promote Open Source culture, especially among new developers. The program rewards participants with goodies including T-Shirts if they send 4 pull requests and thus contribute to any open source project. For several years now, Hacktoberfest has been popular in amFOSS club of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus, and last year alone over 130 students from amFOSS club and bi0s completed the challenge. To the credit, the organizers of the event, DigitalOcean, shared the team’s photo in their official event guide this year, citing as an example for others.

Motivated by this, amFOSS club hosted a two-day program celebrating Hacktoberfest aimed at the freshly joined first years. Officially supported by GitHub and DigitalOcean, our meetup on saw over 100 students kickstarting their open-source journey, producing over 250+ PRs at the event with the support of our mentors who introduced to them VCS, Git & Github, and trained them on the basics of web designing and hosting. In addition to that, the club also had its members giving lightning talks sharing their experiences with open source communities, and guiding them with useful insights on how teams work together, and how software development happens.