Hacktoberfest 2022: Mid-October update

We're halfway through Hacktoberfest, an excellent time to look back and see how much we have accomplished so far. It's also an opportunity to recenter ourselves for the next couple of weeks and conclude this event with a bang.

We're incredibly proud to share that, so far, we've merged 92 pull requests! We're baffled by our contributors' enthusiasm and involvement. We wish to extend a warm thanks to everyone who participated.

And to express our gratitude, we'd like to share our plans for additional Meilisearch swag and common goals, as we teased in our previous Hacktoberfest blog postMeilisearch exclusive swag*

Last year, we sent reusable bottles and some stickers to our contributors. When it came to shipping, it was not all smooth sailing, but we learned a lot from it and have adjusted our strategy this year.

We had settled on reusable bottles in the spirit of eco-friendly and reusable gifts. These values are fundamental to us as we wish to offer goods people can reuse for a long time. Given that most  of our contributors are developers, we've considered that tech-related presents might be particularly appreciated. This is how we came to our current choice.

We're very excited to be able to give all participants a swag box containing a duffle bag, a webcam cover, as well as a touchscreen tool shield.

(This isn't the final design of the goods you'll receive :) )

The touchscreen will ensure you won't have to touch public surfaces and keep your hands germ-free. The webcam cover will guard your privacy. And finally, you'll be able to put all your gifts in your snazzy duffle bag-both, a fashionable and green choice.

If you've had one of your PRs merged or will get one merged before the end of Hacktoberfest, you're eligible to receive your box! Our maintainers will share a link to a simple online form where we will collect the information we need to start the redeeming process.

Common goals 

As we did last yeare strive to not only contribute to the open-source community throughout Hacktoberfest but also hope to pay it forward. This is why we come back again with some collective goals to benefit a greater mission.

For Hacktoberfest 2021, we donated to open-source maintainers, climate activist groups, and groups that support diversity in tech.

This year, we identified local groups that might benefit from our contributions and with whom we hope to foster a closer relationship. We'd love to see how our donations -achieved thanks to you!- will impact their work.

These are the different groups we plan on supporting this year:

Group 1. Diversity in tech

Diversity in tech is, now more than ever, a hot topic. We strive for a world where diversity isn't a debate topic but a simple reality. Within Meilisearch, we do our best to encourage inclusion and acceptance, and we are very grateful for the opportunity the diversity our mostly remote team offers us.

This is why we wish to keep supporting such topics through the following associations:

👩🏿‍🦱 Women on Rails - This LGBTQ+-friendly association works hard to support women that want to practice coding on Ruby and Rails, specifically.

👩🏾‍💻 Ladies of Code Paris - This Paris-based group supports women's careers in tech.

👥 Becometech - Once again, this Paris-based group strives for inclusion and diversity in IT.

Group 2. Climate activism

As a tech company, we are aware of our carbon footprint. To further our efforts in minimizing this impact, we wish to continue to support some climate activist causes such as:

🌊 Seasheperd France - This group works on protecting oceans and raises awareness against aggressive fishing practices.

🌏 Teragi - This association supports sustainability projects through five different active programs

🌴 Reforestaction - This group pushes hard on reforestation efforts.

Group 3. Societal organizations 

Finally, our third group this year tackles social issues. The members of Meilisearch hope to leave this world in a better state than we found it. In these uncertain times where it's so easy to feel divided, we wish to stand together and support the following groups:

👭 MAS les Sophoras , Unapei Alpes Provence - This French, Marseille-based, association supports disabled adults throughout their lives by helping integrate them into society.

🇺🇦 Urgence: santé des femmes Ukrainiennes - This group supports Ukrainian women's health who had to flee their country due to the war, especially with pregnancies.

👫 Perce neige - This Marseille-based group works on supporting mentally handicapped adults. 

How to unlock the donations?

This year, the sky's the limit! It will take 50 PRs to go from one stage to the other, meaning each merged PR represents 10€ of donation.

To calculate the total number of contributions, we will count the number of  Hacktoberfest-related pull requests merged in Meilisearch repositories at the end of the month. We will also consider any PRs tagged with the “Hacktoberfest-accepted” label but have not been merged.

As we mentioned, we've already merged 92 PRs we're happy to announce we've already achieved the first goal on our list! Each of our three groups will be receiving 500€, and that's thanks to your efforts! Let's work hard to bring these donations to the next level by smashing through the rest of our goals.

How to participate?

You still have time to participate for a chance to get your hands on our exclusive swag box and help in achieving our common goals!

You can find all our repos accepting Hacktoberfest contributions here; alternatively, all our Hacktoberfest-eligible issues are here.

There is an issue for everyone, with plenty of good first issues for more novice contributors and more challenging topics for our seasoned devs.

Here are our suggestions for repos that contain some interesting good first issues:

• If you're a language expert, you'll find many issues in Charabia that require your knowledge of the language to improve our tokenizers and make it easier for Meilisearch to process foreign languages. 
• Our PHP integration also offers some issues you might be able to tackle without too much trouble if you're interested.

And, of course, if your PR is not associated with an issue, but gets accepted, we'll be happy to tag it as "Hacktoberfest accepted", so don't let that stop you!

Join our community!

Our Slack community is always open to new members! We have a #hacktoberfest channel where both Meilisearch employees and fellow contributors mingle, so don’t hesitate to join us if you’d like.

We look forward to your feedback on yourHacktoberfest experience.