As in previous years, Parity will participate in Hacktoberfest. However, we've heard from many people who want it to be easier to get into and contribute to Substrate and its wider ecosystem in particular, and have a special reward for just that.

Many people want to contribute to Substrate but struggle to just keep up to date with the current fast pace of development, let alone raise PRs against the continuously changing code base. And yes, we also have to acknowledge that sometimes our tickets aren't precise enough for community contribution and may only get clarified once an experienced contributor takes a crack at it. All of this makes it hard to get started contributing, which is very unfortunate as we'd really love to see more contributions and a wider ecosystem to develop around Substrate.

So, we took the opportunity this year to create cleaner Hacktoberfest-tagged issues that often even have a mentor assigned. We've also put down a range of ideas and concepts we'd love to see happen in the wider ecosystem: everything from specific platform ports, like Substrate on the raspberry pi, to runtime modules and tooling for all sorts of areas and proof-of-concept ideas in, of, and on Substrate. All are tagged with clear indicators including how much time we believe each project will take.

As you might have noticed, these do not really fit into the regular "four PRs"-Hacktoberfest-concept and you might wonder if that means you'll miss out on the opportunity of their nice shirts. And yes, many of these projects are a bit more involved; some also require work outside of GitHub that is not easy to track for the official organisation. So we decided to hand out our own rewards on top: anyone who makes any significant contribution to the Substrate ecosystem during Hacktoberfest is eligible for our own special limited edition Parity Hacktoberfest 2019 gym bag - see the FAQ for further details.

Events & getting help

Furthermore, we are celebrating Hacktoberfest by ramping up our regular and irregular in-person and online events. Every week we will be hosting our Subtrate'n'chill in Berlin as well as the online collaborative learning call, which we will also offer at different times to give access for other time zones and - for the first time - also have some editions of the call via WeChat. There will be further workshops and hacking sessions, standalone and as part of other events that we are taking part in. Check out the hacktoberfest@parity website for a full list of times and places you can meet us and get help for your hacktoberfest contributions.

And should none of these events work for you, or if you just prefer the written form, you can also just come join us on our Substrate developer hub community gitter and general Substrate technical support channel to ask us questions and get help.

More on the Substrate developer hub website for Hacktoberfest 2019.