We’re half way through October, so there are still two weeks to participate in Hacktoberfest this year. For those unfamiliar with it, Hacktoberfest encourages people to contribute to open source by offering free t-shirts to the first X thousand people to contribute 4 relevant pull requests.
For those familiar with the event, that new “relevant” criteria was added this year: pull requests need to be to projects that have a “hacktoberfest” topic, or your pull request needs to be manually marked as “hacktoberfest-accepted” by the project owner. This is an effort to reduce spam that has been bad for the last few years, but especially so this year. You can see details here.
Hacktoberfest is a great way to get started contributing to open source. Find some low hanging fruit that project maintainers may not have the time to knock out: small features, a bug, fleshing out or correcting documentation. There are tons of options out there, and, heck, you might even get a free t-shirt out of it.