With the coming of October, what's become an annual event has started back up to encourage contributions to Open Source projects: Hacktoberfest. This is a joint venture between Digital Ocean, GitHub, and Twilio. If you make the contributions, you'll receive a special limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt

[Here's the rules:] To get a shirt, you must make five pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any timezone. PRs can be to any public repo on GitHub, not just the ones highlighted. The PR must contain commits you made yourself. PRs reported by maintainers as spam or that are automated will be marked as invalid and won't count towards the shirt. This year, the first 50,000 of you can earn a T-shirt (compared with 30,000 in 2017).

The guiding principles of the event are to encourage everyone to contribute (make them feel welcome) and to shoot for quality, not quantity. If you're not sure where to start, check out the main page for the event near the bottom of the page for a listing of projects with open Hacktoberfest issues.

On his site Tomas Votruba has a post sharing one thing he thinks is holding back your company from doing well: not open sourcing code.

Do you want to hire developers? Do you want to hire those developers who help your company in the long term? Do you want to save money for random picks of HR agencies? Do you want to hire developers who already know your code before even meeting you? Do you want to attract developers in the long term with zero investment?

Go Open-source!

He goes on to talk about some of his own experiences in the job interview process and how "old-school methods" aren't working as well as they used to. He then makes some suggestions about how to attract programmers "in a 2018 way". He uses a comparison between the traditional hiring process and a newer one ("open hiring"). He makes the suggestion of, when looking to fill a role, going to the contributors list of your or other popular packages and see who has contributed and reach out to them first. This allows you a preview into their skills and lets you evaluate it (and other contributions) against your needs for the role.

For the Laravel users out there the Laravel News site has shared some handy Bash aliases you can use from the command line to improve and streamline your workflow.

Bash aliases are shortcuts added to a file that allows you to reference another command through more memorable words, abbreviations, or characters. For example, if you use Git you may run git status many times throughout the day, so to save yourself time and keystrokes you could alias gs to git status and it’ll automatically expand and call the proper command.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of unusual aliases and many are unique to the person. Shortcuts that make sense to me, might be confusing and weird to you. That’s what makes these so fun.

He shares how to create a basic alias in your .bash_aliases file and then shares some from different users in the community:

• WaveHack
• Jeffrey Way
• Bill Mitchell
• freekmurze
• sebastiaanluca

Each contribution includes the code needed to define their preferred aliases. They cover everything from general console command simplification out to more complex Laravel-specific functionality.

It's that time of year again - the perfect time to get involved in Open Source. Why? Because DigitalOcean is back with Hacktoberfest once again, encouraging contributions to Open Source no matter the size.

The Laravel News site sums it up nicely:

Hacktoberfest, the month-long festival of code, is back again this year. The event is hosted in partnership between GitHub and DigitalOcean, and the rules are simple. If you make four pull requests between October 1st and October 31st, you’ll get a t-shirt. It’s available worldwide with no stipulations.

While the real incentive is to get more contributions to Open Source project, there's also a side benefit for those that get in their four pull requests during October: a cool t-shirt bearing the logo for this year's event. All you have to do is contribute and four pull requests to any repository (not your own ideally) before the end of October. If you're not sure of where to start and need some ideas, the Hacktoberfest site has you covered with some great suggestions to get you started.

In a recent post to his site Mikkel Høgh makes the suggestion that Drupal is still a gated community, mostly as it relates to the process around the "Project Applications" process.

One of the things the Drupal community prides itself on, is how open the community is. And that is generally true, but there's one exception. And that is the Kafkaesque horror-show we subject any newcomers that would like to publish their code on Drupal.org to. It goes by the name of “Project Applications“. I know several people who've hit this wall when trying to contribute code. It's not uncommon to wait several months to get someone to review your code. And when it does happen, people are often rejected for tiny code style issues, like not ending their comments with a period or similar.

He talks about other factors involving reviews and delays that can also cause authors to abandon their work and feel "unwelcome and unappreciated". He mentions the "review bonus" system and how it's used to encourage participation (or "more hoops" as he puts it) from other authors. He notes that this situation mostly relates to those new to the tool and community and suggests that it just doesn't work (and really is unnecessary). He ends the post with a call to "end the madness" and move to a standardized role that would allow developers to publish without pushing people away and making them feel unwelcome.

In a new post to his site Lukas Smith wonders what's next for Symfony2, the popular PHP framework. Rather than the actual framework, though, he looks at the framework community and wonders where they should direct their attention.

Avid readers of my blog might have noticed a theme in recent blog posts. A while ago I noted that core developers of the early days have become a lot less active. Then I posted about the need to start working on higher level code to make Symfony2 more rapid development friendly. Following this post I blogged about what is missing to make Symfony2 truly great for building REST APIs. Now last evening at DrupalCamp Vienna I was asked what is there left to do for the Symfony2 community and it didn't take me long to think of an answer: Bundles!

He talks about some of the current ecosystem around the framework's major bundles and wonders where people should be focusing. Are there bundles that should be worked on more, building up features and providing a more solid core group of developers (than maybe one or two)?

Daniel Ribeiro has (re)published an article he originally wrote for the Web & PHP Magazine about becoming a PHP evangelist and helping to lead change in the community.

To evangelize is to effectively transfer information regarding one set of beliefs to another, with the final goal of converting each individual to the original belief. Isn’t that what we do when we spread the word of PHP?! The idea behind being a PHP Evangelist is for an individual to speak passionately about PHP and be able to have strong and durable arguments for PHP, if questioned about his “faith” in the technology.

He talks some about the skills and things you'd need to become an evangelist - an advanced knowledge of the language, thinking "out of the box" about problems and how you can stand out from the other people in the community as a leader. He also recommends being technically adept as well and contributing to projects, either through support or actual development.

PHP evangelists are born to lead, to form opinions, influence the opinions of others and to have followers – and haters as well. Even if you think you were not born to be a leader or just don’t want to be one, you will have to get used to public speaking if you wish to become a PHP evangelist.

The Aura Framework project has made a new post to their blog walking you through the steps you'll need to contribute back to the project with your ideas and bugfixes for their various components.

Sometimes you may have noticed a bug, or need a feature implemented, and need to contribute back to the aura community. These are some of the steps to help / contribute to aura project.

They walk you through: setting up git (well, point you to github's guide), fork the main repository and check out a copy, creating a remote to the "upstream" (main) repository and pulling the latest content from it into your fork. Included are the commands to run PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPUnit with the provided tests. From there, it's up to you and your code to contribute back, commit and make a pull request!

On the PHPClasses.org site there's a new episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast wondering if the move of PHP to git will encourage more non-core developers to contribute to the project.

The PHP development migrated to a Git repository. With the integration with GitHub it became easier for non-core developers to submit pull requests with bug fixes and new feature improvements to PHP. Will this new possibility make it PHP core developers accept more contributions from non-core developers?

The episode also looks forward to the next release in the PHP 5.4.x series (5.4.1) and some of the stir that a recent post (to PHPClasses) about OOP caused in the community.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their podcast feed.

As mentioned in this new post from the php|architect site, the voting for their 2012 Impact Awards has begun!

We at php|architect want to honor those who give of themselves so that we can work with PHP and in this great ecosystem. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and want to pause to say thank you. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of March and is open to all php|architect subscribers.

The categories for this year's event are "Up & Coming", "Best Cloud Platform" and "Best PHP Application Platform". Nominees across all of the categories include Joind.in, PintLabs, AppFog, Pagoda Box Drupal 7 and SugarCRM. If you're a subscriber, get in there and vote for your favorites!