All You Need to Know About the Appsmith Hacktoberfest 2021
The quality and value spec is incredibly high when you have a like-minded yet diverse community working together to solve a problem. It is the spirit of collaboration to solve problems that drive open source projects. With open-source, failures can be seen as important milestones to improve as they become moments of learning from the community. Help, resources, perspectives that are beneficial for the community are all available in the open-source world. This is why Appsmith will remain forever free and open-source.
Every year, we look forward to Hacktoberfest because we find it an excellent way to get to know our growing community, and we hope that you find a few issues that you would like to fix, and get to know our product and society better.
Of course, participating in the Appsmith Hacktoberfest can also help you win some swag! In this blog, I am going to help you get started!
What is Hacktoberfest?
Hacktobefest is an annual month-long celebration of open source. It is an excellent opportunity for everyone, from seasoned developers to students, code newbies, technical writers to UX designers, to contribute to open source communities. At the same time, they can develop skills and stand a chance to win limited edition swag.
Before participating in Hacktoberfest, make sure to register on the official DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest site here.
What is Appsmith?
Appsmith is a low code, open-source framework to build internal applications. With its Javascript-based visual development platform, you can build CRUD apps, Dashboards, Admin Panels, and many more 10x faster. You can use pre-built UI widgets, connect them to your APIs and databases to build dynamic apps and complex workflows. And the best part? Deploy these apps on the technology you prefer! (self-host for free!).
One of our community members wrote an in-depth review about Appsmith; check it out here to better understand the framework.
You are welcome to contribute to the issues on Appsmith’s repository on Github. Before raising a PR, please read our contribution guidelines, review, and merge policies.
How to contribute to Appsmith for Hacktoberfest?
To participate in Appsmith Hacktoberfest, make sure you register before raising a PR to Appsmith; this will allow us to track your PRs and ship the swag to your location! Before working on any issue, please ask maintainers to get it assigned to you. Start working on it only after the issue has been assigned.
If you are new to this process and don’t know how to raise a PR, here’s a list of resources to help you get started:
Below, we put together a brief on the various issues of different specialties (engineering, code, content, templates, etc.). However, you are free to wander around the Appsmith Project and take on any current issue or open a new issue that you think is important.
Contributing to Appsmith Code Base
We have a bunch of good-first-issues for Hacktoberfest that are labeled frontend, bug, and many more. You can pick from these based on your interest or expertise and can start working on them. If you need help understanding the issue or have any other code-related questions, chat with us on the Discord channel.
For setting up Appsmith and understanding git workflow, refer to this guide.
> Before raising a pull request, ensure you have submitted a related issue and discussed a plausible solution with a maintainer. This gives your pull request the highest chance of getting merged quickly.
Swag Details
1 Closed PR - Appsmith Stickers
2 Closed PRs - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle
3 Closed PRs - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith T-Shirt
4 Closed PRs - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith Hoodie
4 Closed PRs + - Appsmith Surprise Box
Contributing to Appsmith Documentation
Help improve our documentation and how-to guides! We’re always looking for developer experience for Appsmith, and we believe documentation is one of the core assets. If you are a newbie contributor, this is a great place to get your feet wet with Appsmith. We’ve prepared a list of newbie-friendly Hacktoberfest issues ready to be tackled.
You can find these in our DOCs section here. Feel free to share more content ideas as a comment on the mentioned issue.
I urge you to go through documentation guidelines and get the maintainers to assign it to you before you take up any issue.
Here are some of the examples for good contributions:
Swag Details
1/2 How-to Guide PR - Appsmith Stickers, Mug
3 Closed PRs - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith T-Shirt
4 Closed PRs - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith Hoodie
4+ Closed PRs - Appsmith Surprise Box
Contributing to Appsmith Tutorial or Blog
There are endless tutorial and blog ideas for creating internal applications, admin panels using Appsmith! From simple store catalog manager to complex Postgres admin panel, everything is possible. So far, we’ve made more than 20+ dashboards and admin panels to help developers build internal applications.
We believe the Appsmith community is more than just code! For Hacktoberfest, we are considering tutorials and blogs as valid contributions.
These need not be assigned to you; all you need is to join our discord channel and post your idea in the #hacktobest channel.
You can either publish them on your blog or submit it for publication to the Appsmith blog. Lastly, do not forget to raise a PR on the awesome-appsmith repository, so this contribution is valid towards the contribution amount for both Appsmith and DigitalOcean events 😊.
Take a look at these Tutorials and Blogs to get an idea about what we’re looking for:
Building an Internal Leave Management Dashboard using Google Sheets
Building a Store Catalogue Management System using Appsmith and GraphQL
Swag Details
1 Blog/Tutorial - Appsmith Stickers, Mug
2 Blog/Tutorial - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith Hoodie
3+ Blog/Tutorial - Appsmith Surprise Box
Appsmith Video Contributions
Create video tutorials to help our new community members get started with Appsmith!
It can be anything! How to deploy Appsmith on Linode, use the Google Sheet integration,o work with GraphQl APIs, build a Shopify/Ebay backend on Appsmith... The sky is your limit. Also, it can be in any form! Your recorded video can be uploaded to Youtube, Twitch, or other streaming services. As long as there is a record, we will accept your submission.
Take a look at these video tutorials on our Youtube channel to get inspired!
Raise a PR on awesome-appsmith repository, so your contribution is valid towards the contribution amount for both Appsmith and DigitalOcean events 😊.
Swag Details
1 Video - Appsmith Stickers, Mug
2 Videos - Appsmith Stickers, Water Bottle, Appsmith Hoodie
3+ Videos - Appsmith Surprise Box
Contributing to Appsmith Templates
Help us build excellent forkable admin panels, dashboards, CRUD apps with Appsmith for Hacktoberfest! On Appsmith, it’s super easy to fork any application based on the user permissions. We’re creating an incredible library of templates that will benefit our community.
Here are some of the templates we’ve built:
Raise a PR on awesome-appsmith repository, so your contribution is valid towards the contribution amount for both Appsmith and DigitalOcean events 😊.
If you’ve got any questions, ping me on Discord or send me an email (hacktoberfest@appsmith.com). We’ve also listed some more FAQs on this page; please do go through them.