If you are interested in participating in this year’s Hacktoberfest, this workshop is a great place to start! This project-based workshop will introduce you to open source, version control, Git, and GitHub using the Cloud Haiku repository as a model. Once you learn the fundamentals, you will know how to contribute to open source projects and submit a pull request on GitHub. No prior coding experience is necessary to follow along in the workshop.

When software developers work on a project together, oftentimes they’ll need to work on the same code base. While they’re working, each developer needs to know about what changes the others made to the code, so as not to duplicate work or write code over what has already been done. Git, a version control system used to manage developer projects of all sizes, was created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, to help developers contribute to code and share code revisions in a way that was fast, efficient, and inexpensive. Git creates code repositories to help developers edit, share, and publish code for all. GitHub is a cloud-based Git repository hosting service that allows developers to take code that they’ve written on their local machines and share it with the world.

With Git and GitHub, developers from all over the world collaborate on all sorts of projects — many of the websites you visit regularly are maintained using GitHub. Knowing how to use Git and GitHub, and learning how to contribute to open source projects will provide new developers with a strong start in gaining the skills they need to join the software engineering community at large.

In this workshop, we’ll introduce you to Git and GitHub, the version control system that Hacktoberfest uses to track your progress, and the repository hosting service that shares projects to collaborate on. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be ready to submit your first pull request and will be well on your way to participating in Hacktoberfest!

To participate as a workshop leader or learner, you will need the following:

• A code editor. In this workshop, we’ll be using Visual Studio Code, which you can download for free for Mac, Windows, or Linux.
• A web browser. In this workshop, we’ll be using Google Chrome as our default browser, which you can also download for free for Mac, Windows, or Linux.
• A GitHub account. In this workshop, we’ll make a contribution to an open source repo on GitHub. You can sign up for a free account using your default browser.

Once you have your prerequisites ready, you will be ready to begin the workshop. Refer to the speaker slides for helpful links after the workshop or watch the How to Submit Your First Pull Request video to review.