October 2018 Summaries

The open source community is thriving, with over 55% of developers actively contributing to projects. Newer developers (0-5 years experience) are more likely to contribute than veteran developers, and those in India are more likely to participate than developers from other parts of the world. The main barriers to contribution include feeling unsure about how to get started, not having the right skills, or companies not offering time for employees to contribute. Despite these challenges, nearly three-quarters of respondents believe their companies expect them to use open source software as part of their day-to-day work. Companies that participate in Hacktoberfest see significant gains in open-source contributions to their repositories, and the event aims to encourage more participation from both veteran and new coders.

DigitalOcean has released version 1.0.0 of the DigitalOcean Terraform Provider, a major milestone marking their commitment to supporting its continued development after taking ownership of the project. The release includes numerous new features, improvements, and bug fixes, with contributions from various community members. To learn more about Terraform and its inner workings, DigitalOcean will be attending HashiConf in San Francisco next week, featuring talks on building a Terraform provider and exploring recommended resources for users.

This article discusses the importance of documentation in open source repositories, highlighting its role in facilitating contributions and growing a user base. To create welcoming spaces for developers and end users, it emphasizes incorporating documentation into the development cycle, including comments within code files and providing tutorials for users. The ideal setup includes key files such as README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_STYLE.md, and CONTRIBUTORS.md to guide contributors and provide support for users. By making documentation inclusive and accessible, projects can reach a wider audience and foster engagement among diverse voices.

In preparation for GitHub Universe, DigitalOcean is hosting an event where attendees can sign up for a $200 credit to try their products over 60 days and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation by sharing photos on social media using #DigitalOceanLovesOS. During this event, Sneha will be giving a talk about observability, specifically how Prometheus was used to instrument and test features within DigitalOcean's software-defined networking pillar, highlighting key visualizations and takeaways for attendees.

Hacktoberfest is a five-year-old program that aims to give back to the open source community by encouraging developers to contribute meaningfully to projects and earn limited edition t-shirts. The event, now in partnership with GitHub and Twilio, has seen over 100,000 developers from 120 countries participate, contributing nearly 400,000 pull requests to almost 100,000 repositories. This year's celebration will have new rules and details, including a cap on t-shirts, more resources for beginners, and the introduction of "Hacktoberfest Values" to bring participants closer together around the shared goal of giving back meaningfully. To participate, developers must make five pull requests between October 1-31 in any timezone to any public repo on GitHub, with the first 50,000 participants earning a shirt. The program has led to significant offline community growth and connections among developers, with companies like SendGrid and OpenEBS dedicating their teams' time to participating.

DigitalOcean has announced that its Kubernetes product is graduating from Early Access to Limited Availability, marking a significant milestone in its development. The company has gained valuable insights from users who tested the product during Early Access, which have been used to increase reliability and resolve bugs. DigitalOcean Kubernetes will be a paid product during this phase, offering more regions for Droplet workers with full support. Users can start with a single node cluster using a $5/mo Droplet and scale their applications as needed, with options for persistent storage and public IP exposure. The company is now working through its backlog of signup requests and will provide access to users who signed up during Early Access soon.