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Hacktoberfest & our community
Hacktoberfest is a global, October-long celebration of open source. Minsk Python Meetup has hosted local online kick-offs so people in Belarus (and friends abroad) can start the month together — ask questions, pick projects, and ship useful contributions.
What is Hacktoberfest?
DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014 as a simple challenge: contribute to open source during October and join a worldwide wave of maintainers and newcomers. Over the years the format evolved — from counting pull requests toward a t-shirt, to stronger maintainer protections, GitLab support, digital badges, and community meetups listed with partners like Major League Hacking (MLH).
The spirit stayed the same: lower the barrier to a first meaningful contribution, celebrate maintainers, and remind everyone that documentation fixes and small improvements count.
From 2026 onward, the official program (run with MLH and DEV, presented by DigitalOcean) leans into local and online Fests focused on learning and building — including open-source AI — rather than a PR counter alone. See hacktoberfest.com for the current year. Our pages below document how Minsk Python Meetup took part in earlier editions.
How Minsk Python Meetup took part
2018. Before we hosted Hacktoberfest under our own name, community organisers helped bring an October open-source weekend to Minsk: Wagtail Space Minsk was a Wagtail-led code sprint. Prepared issues often carried both a Minsk sprint label and a Hacktoberfest label. That weekend was Wagtail Space first — and an early chapter in local October contribution culture. See also the community history of how the meetup was becoming an independent community at the same time.
2019. There was no separate Minsk Python Hacktoberfest. On ordinary meetup evenings the community still talked about open source and identity — for example a talk on Django contributing and a discussion of what a professional community is (both on 15 May 2019).
2020. Through spring and early summer, Tuesday Python Pet Projects sessions (later focused on real open-source work) were already described by organisers in June as preparation for Hacktoberfest in October. We then ran the first Hacktoberfest events under the Minsk Python Meetup banner: an online kick-off at the start of October and a Final Night on the 31st. We continued with Discord kick-offs in 2021, then again in 2024 and 2025 — welcoming beginners, people from other IT roles, maintainers, and contributors in any language (Python especially welcome).
Events were online, time-zoned for Minsk (UTC+3), and oriented around planning October together: how the year’s rules worked, where to find good issues, and how to open quality pull or merge requests. The dedicated Discord space remains the hangout for Hacktoberfest chatter with the community.
We did not list separate local Hacktoberfest events for 2022 or 2023 on the community site; the tradition resumed in 2024. Our website repository also carries the
hacktoberfest topic
so people browsing opted-in projects can find us.
Events by year
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2020
First local edition: kick-off (2 Oct) and Final Night (31 Oct). The year open source learned hard lessons about spam PRs.
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2021
Discord kick-off on 1 October — open to all levels, any language, with maintainer-friendlier rules.
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2024
MLH-listed kick-off: getting started, Python OSS tips, and quality pull requests.
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2025
Kick-off plus 30+ curated Python repos (grouped by Hacktoberfest readiness) from the talk slides.
Join us
Whether you are planning your first October contribution or bringing a repository for others to help with, you are welcome. Drop into Discord for Hacktoberfest, follow the main community chat on Telegram, or browse our public work on GitHub.