Hacktoberfest is a month long virtual event where you can make four contributions towards your favorite Open Source project (such as Cosmos by OpenGenus). You will not only get to learn new things but also get free goodies delivered to you at your doorstep. It is powered by DigitalOcean.

Being a part of Hacktoberfest since 2018, we strongly recommend you to participate in this. It will take a few hours over a few days and the benefits and enjoyment will be life-long.

We, at OpenGenus, are completely open towards helping you participate at Hacktoberfest 2020.

Note: If you are an existing Intern, you can message your mentor in your Internship tracker directly to help you contribute at our projects at Hacktoberfest.

Step 1: Get your local copy of our code

To keep it simple, you may get started with Cosmos project by OpenGenus if you are interested in Algorithms and Data Structures or Computing concepts in general.

Steps:

• Go to our project code (github.com/opengenus/cosmos)
• Click on the fork button to create your own copy (github.com/<your_username>/cosmos)
• Explore the code for your fun

In fact, you can chose any project of your choice. Browse through other great projects at OpenGenus:

• Quark
• Cosmos Search

Step 2: Learn to make a pull request

You can go through this detailed guide to learn how to make a pull request:

Steps to create a pull request at GitHub

This year our focus is to maintain quality over quantity. So, one basic contribution so that you get acquainted with the process is fine.

We, strongly, suggest to take up good scope of contributions so that you learn new ideas over the course and

Step 3: Make 1st Contribution

As the first contribution, you can work on a simple contribution such as adding code for a specific algorithm/ data structure/ application, fix bugs in existing code and others.

For example:

Check this pull request Added Code for TSP using Branch & Bound #5887 by Abhijit Tripathy

Step 4: Make 2nd Contribution

In this step, you should read a random article at OpenGenus, understand the topic and prepare 10 questions to judge whether you understood it at a later point.

You need to document these 10 questions (with answers) as an article at OpenGenus and open a pull request to add the meta-data of the article and link at readme at Cosmos.

Check this pull request as a sample: Update global_metadata.json #5830 by Raksha

To get an invite, just comment under this thread/ article and you will receive an email invite to join OpenGenus IQ as an author in some time. The steps are as follows:

• You are added to our Hacktoberfest group
• On this, you will receive an email invite (check spam section) to join OpenGenus IQ
• Once you have joined, you can login at iq.opengenus.org/ghost and get started with your article. This is our writing guidelines.
• Discuss and get your article reviewed in our help thread

Our Hacktoberfest group:

Step 5: Make 3rd Contribution

For the 2nd scope of contribution, you should write an article at OpenGenus IQ on a topic which you are already comfortable in. For example, if you have worked on coding a script recently, you can explain the process/ approach you took to develop it in an article.

We will make a pull request with a preview link to your article and add associated code (if available).

To make sure a topic is available, you can discuss with your mentor or make sure it is available by searching on Google like:

<topic> site:iq.opengenus.org

Some sample articles contributed:

• Chrome Dinosaur (T-Rex 🦖) game with Processing in Java by Priyanshi Sharma
• Minimum Bitwise OR operations to make any two array elements equal by Ishaan Ahuja

Step 6: Make 4th Contribution

For the 4th scope of contribution, you shall write an article at OpenGenus IQ on a topic that is new to you and is under your interest.

You can explore a research paper as well which can be challenging but will be interesting as well.

If you have any confusion, just let me know. We are here to help you get knowledge by contributing and in the process, get free goodies delivered at your doorstep.