Meilisearch returns for Hacktoberfest 2022!

October is finally upon us, and with it comes Hacktoberfest, a staple in the open-source community. Once a year and for a whole month, we all come together and contribute to open-source projects.

But this won’t be the first time Meilisearch joins the melee! We've been participating since 2020, and each time you consistently blew us away with your passion and hard work. Looking back on everything accomplished last year, we're so proud that last year we merged 159 PRs from 90 different collaborators. We're very grateful for your input which allows Meilisearch to grow and progress so quickly.

A little bit about us

Meilisearch is an open-source search engine built in Rust. Both team and community worked hard to build integrations with most of the popular development languages, frameworks, and deployment options so that Meilisearch fits seamlessly into most developer workflows. Our goal: a simple and intuitive experience for both developers and end-users.

Our main repository, meilisearch, handles the power of our core engine milli and other libraries it’s built on. These include  Charabia, our tokenizer, which allows us to offer optimized  support for space-separated languages (like English and French), Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Thai.

 Does that sound interesting? Why not consider contributing to our project this year?

If you're keen on knowing which Meilisearch repositories are eligible for Hacktoberfest, then the answer is… a whole bunch of them! You'll be able to support our efforts by improving the Ruby SDK, the Python or the Rust wrapper, and even polishing Swift or JavaScript clients for the Meilisearch API. And that's to quote only a few of them. You can contribute to whichever repository you're most comfortable with or, on the contrary, decide to challenge yourself with something less familiar. Hacktoberfest is a great time to experiment and push your limits!

Hacktoberfest guidelines @ Meilisearch:

First, if you're keen on participating, why not look at our official guidelines right here. Following these ensures we can provide you with the best contributing experience, including efficient reviews of your PRs. In short, this is what the guidelines are all about:

• Our official reviewing window is Mon-Thur worktime (CEST)
• After our maintainers take the time to review your work, please make sure to address all their comments before requesting more feedback
• We will not accept contributions to our documentation repo this year
• We do not assign issues to contributors: instead, the team will approve the PR that best solves the problem at hand
• We will not consider low-quality PRs. If you're unsure what we mean by "low-quality PR", take a look at how the Hacktoberfest organizers define it in their participation guidelines 

We've tagged repos with the Hacktoberfest topic. All contributions to these repositories are eligible for the event, but we added the Hacktoberfest label to the issues  we feel  are the best suited for contributions. We hope this will also allow you to navigate our repositories more easily.

What type of contribution for Hacktoberfest 2022?

Hacktoberfest is a time to celebrate everything open-source. Code-oriented contributions are more than welcome as always, but that's not all! The open-source community is vast and multi-talented.

While the documentation repository is not taking part this year, you can participate in our Awesome Meilisearch repos by adding new resources. These resources have to be links to awesome blog posts, tutorials, demos, guides, talks, or just about anything else that teaches people how to do cool things with Meilisearch. You can also create videos if that's where your talent lies. Any demos and talks, use cases, or posts will be equally appreciated. 

Extra rewards and shared goals

Last year, as a small token of gratitude to our contributors, we sent exclusive Meilisearch swag all over the world in the form of a reusable bottle and a few fancy stickers. Unfortunately, we faced dispatching and customs issues in some countries and not everyone received their package. We've learned from our mistakes and came up with  solutions that will allow us to circumvent similar problems this year. So, rest assured: we have  prepared new exclusive swag and this time we’ll ensure everyone gets it. These goods are additional rewards you can receive on top of the ones provided by the Hacktoberfest organizers.

In a similar spirit, last year we set common goals that, if reached, would translate into a monetary donation toward three families of organizations that strive for diversity and inclusivity in software engineering. As you might have heard, we smashed these  collective goals, donating a total of 4500 euros to nine different organizations, all tacking important issues ranging from inclusivity in tech, open source maintainers and climate activists. Motivated by last year's success, we will renew our commitment to creating common goals for a set of different organizations.

It's still too early for us to spoil the surprise, but be on the lookout for our future blog post sharing all the details of our goodies boxes and common goals.

Join our community!

We invite you to join our community and our dedicated #hacktoberfest channel where both Meilisearch employees and fellow contributors mingle. Hacktoberfest isn't only a good time to work on a project, it's also a fantastic opportunity to meet people passionate about open-source.

Questions? Doubts? Comments? We'd love to hear any feedback you may have concerning your Hacktoberfest experience.