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Web Development

Hacktoberfest 2019 — An Intro to Open Source Software Appreciation Month

Hacktoberfest is here, and our top-notch dev team is getting involved! Read on to discover how we're giving back to the OSS community this month...

Hacktober 2019 banner.

Today sees the start of Hacktoberfest 2019, a month-long global event that promotes participation in the Open Source Software (OSS) community.

Now in its sixth year, developers, students, tech companies or anyone else for that matter, are encouraged to actively contribute to the ever growing number of OSS projects that are made available for free.

Open Source Software cover a wide range of projects; it could be a Javascript library that makes images rotate on a website, a framework built to make developing a web application easier, or even the software a server runs on, but fundamentally its developed for free, and made available to use or change for free without restriction - sounds great right?

You may think that most of the programs that the internet runs on are developed by big companies with hundreds of developers, but in fact, much of the code used is built and supported by individuals or non-profit organisations who want to provide something useful that others can benefit from.

Despite the free-for-all nature of OSS, there is an expectation from users that a project is maintained, features added and bugs fixed. For an owner, especially if their project is popular, it can be difficult to keep on top of these demands and unfortunately if it becomes too much, it can result in successful projects being closed or left to go stale overtime.

Run in partnership with Digital Ocean and Dev.to, Hacktoberfest puts an emphasis on users of OSS to give some time back to the projects that they use by raising Pull Requests (PRs) through GitHub.com. Their contributions can range from anything such as updates to online documentation or bug fixes to new requested features. Individuals that raise four PRs between 1st October and 31st qualify for a much coveted Hacktoberfest t-shirt and if there is one thing our developers love more than tech stickers it’s a free t-shirt!

Why is it relevant to Extreme?

As an agency, much of our tech stack is based on Open Source Software. Our chosen Content Management System (CraftCMS) is a PHP application that can be enhanced and extended through a wide variety of community provided plugins all based on the Yii framework. Our frontend developers love the latest JavaScript libraries and bundle CSS, JS, Images and HTML together using Webpack. Then, all this is hosted on service running Linux based operating systems.

Without OSS we’d be developing very different websites for our clients and as we clearly love Open Source we’d really like to give something back to the people who help us without knowing it.

What can Extreme do?

Through October we’re giving everyone in our development team the opportunity to spend a day contributing to Open Source projects of their choice. That will mean nearly 50 hours of development time can be given back to OSS as a thank you.

The developers will be able to choose any projects they like to help and hopefully some will get close to qualifying for their free clobber.

You’ll be able to keep up with their progress, be able to find out a little more about our development team and see which OSS projects they’ve been contributing too here or on our social media channels.

Could our dev team work some magic on your digital presence?

Show me the code

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Extreme

Marketing Agency

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