Hacktoberfest is Digitalocean’s annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. Much of modern tech infrastructure—including some of digitalocean’s own products—relies on open-source projects built and maintained by passionate people who often don’t have the staff or budgets to do much more than keep the project alive. Hacktoberfest is all about giving back to those projects, sharpening skills, and celebrating all things open source, especially the people that make open source so special!

How do I participate?

DigitalOcean’s official site has some great resources for contributors as well as a plethora of beginner resources.

What is CircuitPython?

CircuitPython is a programming language designed to simplify experimenting and learning to code on low-cost microcontroller boards. It’s totally open source.

Which repositories for CircuitPython can I contribute to?

For a list, go to this page.

The CircuitPython core is written in C and requires the most knowledge and experience to contribute to, so it’s best for folks with prior development experience. Do you have a favorite board that uses a supported chipset and doesn’t have a CircuitPython port yet? Follow our Learn Guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-add-a-new-board-to-circuitpython to add support so that you and others can run CircuitPython code on the device. Or you could take a look through open issues on the CircuitPython repo and pick one to tackle and submit a PR for: https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/issues.

The CircuitPython Libraries are written in Python and may be easier for folks with less prior experience to contribute to. Head over to https://circuitpython.org/contributing for a list of open PRs and issues that you can help with. The issues can be filtered by tag, including the ‘good first issue’ tag which identifies tasks that are good first contributions to people who haven’t worked with CircuitPython before but maybe have some Python knowledge in another realm. You can see the good first issues here: https://circuitpython.org/contributing/open-issues?label=good-first-issue

We’re also looking for CircuitPython board demo scripts for all of the many devices that support CircuitPython. This is Python code, but will be PR’d to the core repo inside of the specific board directory. Demo scripts should be minimal but illustrate the basic usage of any built-in hardware or peripherals.

We’ve got a Learn Guide that covers the process of contributing with Git and Github: https://learn.adafruit.com/contribute-to-circuitpython-with-git-and-github and there are folks around throughout the week on the Adafruit Discord who can offer assistance to folks with contributions.