From October 1–31, we’re once again partnering with Digital Ocean and Twilio for Hacktoberfest—a month-long event celebrating the open source community by encouraging developers to contribute to open source projects. This year, we’re also partnering with and highlighting several projects using open source to make the world a better place. We hope you’ll join us in supporting this socially impactful work by contributing to these projects:

alex

Alex makes sure your writing is considerate by catching potential insensitive phrasing.

Support needed:

• Website and documentation help on alexjs.com, including new phrases to catch and improved messages for the words they already catch
• Translation, including possibilities to translate the project into languages other than English or support HTML alongside Markdown and plain-text

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

REFUGE Restrooms

REFUGE restrooms indexes and maps safe restroom locations for trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming individuals.

Support needed:

• Multiple areas. The team is looking for help with tasks of all sizes. As an all volunteer open source project, there are plenty of opportunities.

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

GliaX

The GliaX project is making health care accessible to everyone, everywhere. They use the newest in tech to make high-quality open source medical devices and increase availability to those who need them.

Support needed:

• Usability improvements, including improvements to the stethoscope, otoscope, and tourniquet devices
• Engineering and firmware, including help for the pulse oximeter and electrocardiogram devices

Contributor level: Advanced

HospitalRun

HospitalRun aims to improve access to medical care for some of the most vulnerable patients in the world by improving the software tooling that hospital administrators in charitable hospitals use to facilitate care.

Support needed:

• Bug fixes
• Feature development in Ember.js

Contributor level: Intermediate to advanced with knowledge of Ember.js

if me

If me is an open source, not-for-profit mental health web app that encourages people to share their experiences with loved ones and trusted allies.

Support needed:
The team recently redesigned their app, so there are opportunities to refactor code and improve performance, usability, and accessibility.

• Blog support
• Community organization
• App translation
• Feature improvements

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

Talk

Talk is an open source commenting platform focused on better conversation, brought to you by Mozilla, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Support needed:

• Moderation features like new searching and filtering capabilities or custom moderation queues
• Commenting features like new reactions, new badges, or adding translations
• Features ranging from adding or changing CSS on the frontend to adding custom plugins and API/backend enhancements

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap

Through local people, local tools, and open knowledge, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team works to provide open map data and tools to revolutionize disaster management, reduce risks, and address the world’s toughest challenges. When major disaster strikes anywhere in the world, thousands of volunteers come together online and on the ground to create open map data that enables disaster responders to reach those in need.

Support needed:

• Documentation
• User-experience improvements
• Application performance improvements

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

OptiKey

OptiKey is an on-screen keyboard designed to help Motor Neuron Disease (MND) patients interact with Windows computers. OptiKey seeks to allow anyone to use their computer fully with only head or eye movements. Never should someone with a disability have to pay for the ability to speak to their loved ones and stay in touch with the world around them.

Support needed:

• Bug fixes
• Technical support for extending OptiKey with new features

Contributor level: Beginner to advanced

In addition to inviting you to contribute to these open source projects, we’re hosting a challenge in the GitHub Community Forum where you can get recognition for contributing to projects from the Social Impact Collection during Hacktoberfest. For more information on the challenge or to sign up today, please head over to the challenge home page.

Those who complete the challenge by 11:59pm PT on October 31 will receive a limited edition badge on their Community Forum profile in recognition of their achievement and to thank them for helping projects make a positive impact.

Returning for its second year, Open Jam is an 80-hour game jam brought to you by @Jared-Sprague, @mwcz, and opensource.com. Game jams are focused on creating games with a few constraints, like adhering to a limited time frame in creating a game, staying within a theme, or using only a specific technology. Participants are encouraged to use open source game engines, libraries, tools, and Creative Commons assets.

Last year’s Open Jam theme ‘Leave a mark’ brought about a frenzy of fun games including Stellar Wrath, a game about solar system sabotage created with Godot.

Open Jam is a perfect excuse to experiment with building a game if you haven’t before. With so many tutorials online and a growing number of game engines, it’s easy to make an addictive Java-based text adventure or JavaScript-powered platformer.

The three top-rated games of Open Jam will have their playable demos featured at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC from October 21–23.

Pictured: Stellar Wrath by DualWielding was one of last year’s winners on display at All Things Open.

The 2018 events kicks off on October 5, so keep refreshing the itch.io jam page for the theme announcement, tips, tutorials, and competition details. If you can’t participate in Open Jam, don’t worry—Game Off, GitHub’s very own month-long game jam, will return next month.

Join Open Jam 2018 now

Join us at the GitHub office in Amsterdam for Hacktoberfest’s 5th anniversary! On Tuesday, October 2, from 19:00 to 22:00, we’re celebrating with food, drinks, learning, and great company.

Learn how to contribute to open source from local maintainers, get up to speed on how GitHub works, and make some pull requests. The evening will begin with presentations from local open source maintainers, an introduction to how open source works, and how you can contribute. Then we’ll help new and experienced folks get down to business. Don’t worry—we’ll have plenty of snacks and stickers to help fuel your ideas.

New to open source? We’ll help you along the way. Already an experienced contributor? Come and hack on your favorite project, and help mentor folks! No contribution is too small, and we’ll have lots of help on hand, including @DEGoodmanWilson (GitHub) and @floord (Phusion).

Register now

Date: Tuesday, October 2
Time: 19:00 - 22:00
Address: Spaces Vijzelstraat, Vijzelstraat 68-72, 1017 HL Amsterdam

Can’t make this event? It’s not too late to find another one nearby, or even organize your own event at your club, school, or workplace!

Events are kicking off all around the world:

• Bangkok
• Bhubaneswar
• Luxembourg

…and more, coming to a city near you!

Check out the Hacktoberfest Event Kit for more information.

Join us at GitHub HQ in San Francisco for Hacktoberfest’s 5th anniversary! On Monday, October 1, 2018, from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm we’re celebrating with food, drinks, learning, and great company.

We’re hosting a workshop on contributing to open source, plus we have some demos and lightning talks from a few guests speakers, including @KyleAMathews (Gatsby creator), @codebytere (Electron engineer), and @michael-watson (Apollo GraphQL engineer). See the Eventbrite page for the complete agenda.

Register now

Date: Monday, October 1
Time: 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Address: 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St, San Francisco, CA 94107

Can’t make this event? It’s not too late to find another one nearby, or even organize your own event at your club, school, or workplace.

Events are kicking off all around the world:

• Atlanta
• Glasgow
• Visakhapatnam
• Mauritius …and more, coming to a city near you!

Check out the Hacktoberfest Event Kit for more information.

GitHub Universe is just under a month away. With the countdown officially on, we’re excited to share all of the things you need to know for Universe 2018. Our complete schedule of Universe sessions and speakers is now live, and there’s something for everyone: three tracks, 30 breakouts, a full day of technical workshops, and plenty of learning in between.

Build your own Universe

This year, we’re highlighting the future of software—and celebrating the people and projects that push technology forward. Our three attendee tracks are here to help you build a custom Universe itinerary and get the most out of two jam-packed days at the historic Palace of Fine Arts:

• Developer experience
• Scaling your business
• Enabling your platform

Get into the code

Looking to learn something new? Take the “developer experience” pathway and dive into how the problems of tomorrow are being solved by your peers. Find out what the future holds for your favorite tools and technology—and build your own solutions.

The “developer experience” pathway includes sessions like:

• Code you can hold: Making your first IoT wearable Charlyn Gonda (Uber Engineering) Pick up a soldering iron and put on safety goggles—it’s time to make things. Get started with microcontroller programming, beginning with the Particle Photon board, a wifi-enabled microcontroller.
• Leveling up WebAssembly itself: Going from MVP to brave new world Lin Clark (Mozilla) Unlock the future of WebAssembly and build your own. Learn how to code a WebAssembly module and see your module’s impact on the real world—or at least on the interactive light environment that coming to GitHub Universe. Then take control of the art installation with your WebAssembly module and walk through your creation.
• GitHub Learning Lab: Teaching robots to teach Jason Etcovitch (GitHub) Discover how we built the Learning Lab app using public GitHub APIs and Probot, a framework for building GitHub Apps. Build your own courses on Learning Lab to teach developers how you work, what your product or integration does, or something completely new.

Grow your business to scale

It’s exciting to see your business grow—but growth also comes with its own new set of challenges. Our “scaling your business” pathway offers real-life case studies and insight from some of today’s top business leaders, including how they tackled the unique business demands that come with rapid growth.

Check out more of the highlights:

• GitHub Enterprise at scale: Behind the scenes at Salesforce.com Vamshidhar Gandham (Salesforce), Michael Johnson (GitHub) Wondering how to get started with GitHub Enterprise? Find out why Salesforce started using GitHub, the tools they created to simplify migration, and how GitHub Enterprise has helped them change the face of DevOps.
• The world’s largest company explains why the future needs more women who code Fiona Tan (Walmart) Increasing the number of women who can code, and specifically in the growing field of artificial intelligence, is critical. Examine why women are fundamental to the future of the self-learning algorithms that power AI and why closing the gender gap in STEM is not only important for business, but important for society.
• Moving from mono to multi: How Continental Corporation manages a distributed code base Timm Drevensek (Continental Corporation) Working with larger software projects means you’ll eventually need to decide how to organize your code base. See how the Continental team overcame limitations, how to deal with distributed code bases, and what’s possible when integrating with GitHub.

Keep your platform healthy

Is your platform performing at its best? Follow the “enabling your platform” pathway and explore how leveraging the right tools (and embracing necessary change) can help your platform reach its full potential. Find out how developers from companies like Airbnb, Contentful—plus GitHub itself—keep things running smoothly behind the scenes.

And just a few examples of what else you’ll learn:

• From Monorail to Monorepo: Airbnb’s journey into microservices Jens Vanderhaeghe (Airbnb) Airbnb has grown exponentially over the last few years—and so has their codebase. Hear some of the unique challenges they face as their engineering team grows and how they plan to transition toward a service-oriented architecture—a multi-year effort involving hundreds of engineers across the company.
• Infrastructure as product: Building GitHub’s future Sophie Haskins (GitHub) Learn the story of Moda—GitHub’s internal service platform and set of tools, practices, and ideas for running software on Kubernetes. Discover how we approached big infrastructure changes, what’s worked well, and why we made the decisions we did.
• API mashup: Combining APIs using GraphQL schema stitching Rouven Weßling (Contentful) The best mashups are seamless and natural. In today’s golden age of APIs, nobody would be surprised if you used more than six APIs in a project. But, like songs, they all work slightly differently. Find out how to use schema stitching to annotate the GitHub API with metadata about the repositories and users in an organization, resulting in a more powerful API that’s ready to build great tooling with less effort.

Get even more Universe with Workshop Day

Universe isn’t just product launches and after parties. We want you to go home with the practical tools and experience you need to keep building your best. If you’re looking to learn even more—and get an extra day of Universe—join us a day early for technical workshops on October 15.

Like our conference sessions, Workshop Day features three unique attendee tracks. We’ll cover everything from the secrets of great maintainers to scaling GitHub within your organization. Just pick your path to get started:

• 2018: An Open Source Odyssey - Workshops for individuals and teams interested in innersource, open source, and everything in between
• U, Robot - Workshops for builders and bot lovers 🤖
• Git Runner 2048 - Workshops for future Git and GitHub superusers

Check out Universe Workshops

Your Universe is what you make it

Whether you want the latest coding tools, tips to successfully scale your business from industry experts, or tried-and-trued insights to take your platform to the next level, Universe 2018 is a place for everyone—and an experience completely yours. Tickets are limited, so reserve your seat and conference pathway as soon as possible. We can’t wait to see you there!

Get your tickets