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Hacktoberfest in Belarus, 2020
2020 was our first year hosting Hacktoberfest gatherings under the Minsk Python Meetup banner. Two online sessions bookended the month: a kick-off to get people started, and a Final Night to share what actually happened — including the chaos that made that October infamous across open source.
Local October open source did not start from a blank slate: in 2018 community members helped organise Wagtail Space Minsk, a Wagtail code sprint whose prepared issues often also carried a Hacktoberfest label. In 2020, spring–summer Tuesday Python Pet Projects sessions (and an explicit June note that those meetings helped prepare for Hacktoberfest) bridged into October. 2020 is when we first ran events branded as Hacktoberfest ourselves.
Kick-off — Friday, 2 October
The community chat also announced a first Hacktoberfest Discord call for Thursday, 1 October (19:00). The MLH-listed kick-off evening below is Friday, 2 October — treat the 1st as an early community call and the 2nd as the formal event schedule we keep here.
The evening ran from 19:00 to 22:00 UTC+3. It was framed as an online meetup for anyone curious about Hacktoberfest — students, working professionals, and younger participants were all welcome.
Hacktoberfest itself was presented as a month-long celebration of open source (DigitalOcean with partners DEV and Intel that year): maintainers guiding contributors toward useful issues, and contributors giving back to projects they already loved or had just discovered. Small fixes and documentation were explicitly valid ways to take part.
Agenda
- Welcome
- Networking
- Introduce Hacktoberfest
- Demos
- Questions
That year’s challenge
At the start of October 2020, the public rules were roughly: register on the Hacktoberfest site, then open four pull requests between 1–31 October. Qualifying PRs could go to any public GitHub repository — not only repos that had opted in. Completers among the limited early cohort could earn a shirt; spam or code-of-conduct problems could disqualify a participant.
Mid-month, maintainers worldwide were flooded with low-effort and spammy PRs chasing the shirt. DigitalOcean and the community responded by tightening rules: repositories needed to opt in, spam labeling improved, and gaming repos were shut out. That mid-course correction is part of why 2020 is remembered as both a boom year for first-time contributors and a stress test for maintainers — and why our Final Night description called the start of the month “a little bit difficult and ambiguous.”
Final Night — Saturday, 31 October
On the last day of the month we met again online, 22:00–23:59 UTC+3, for a closing party: share impressions from the first half of Hacktoberfest (and the rest of October), advertise projects, ask questions, and celebrate endings together.
Agenda
- Welcome
- Share experience from Hacktoberfest so far
- Advertise your projects
- Questions
- Small talk
- Endings celebration
Why this year still matters
For our community, 2020 established that Hacktoberfest could be a local tradition — even when “local” meant Discord and video calls. For open source at large, it forced clearer norms: opt-in projects, accepted (not merely opened) contributions, and less incentive to spam. Later editions of Hacktoberfest, and our own later kick-offs, built on those lessons.