Hacktoberfest at Neo4j


With October now upon us, it is now that time of the year where we celebrate open source projects, their maintainers and the entire open source community who regularly take the time and effort to contribute to a wide range of projects. As huge fans of open source projects at Neo4j ourselves, we would like to take this opportunity to invite all of our current and future community members to contribute to Neo4j related projects as part of Hacktoberfest 2022.

(neo4j)-[:LOVES]->(hacktoberfest)

What Is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is a month-long event, this year running from 4 October until 31 October, where folks of all experience levels are invited to contribute to their favorite open source projects. Since 2014, Hacktoberfest (run by DigitalOcean, Docker) has been rewarding contributors to open-source projects with swag in exchange for pull requests, and more recently even planting trees in the contributor’s name.

This year they are promoting three values:

  • Everyone is welcome.
  • Quantity is fun, quality is key.
  • Short-term action, long-term impact.

While contributing code is often more involved, as it also requires understanding the project in enough detail and adds additional workload on the maintainers, improving documentation especially from a users perspective is a great way to help everyone. Another important area to contribute is to update example projects to use the latest version of the software.

Improving Documentation & Guides

This year, Hacktoberfest isn’t just about writing code. This year, the organizers are encouraging anyone to make contributions, whether they have technical experience or none at all. This could be anything from helping improve technical documentation, or providing translations to existing documentation.

In this spirit, we would like to invite the Neo4j community to help improve our documentation. Ask yourself, is there something you wish you had known when you first started using Neo4j?

What is the one key piece of advice you would give someone using Neo4j for the first time.

Most of the Neo4j docs, developer guides, and knowledge base articles have an Edit This Page link on the top right. You can use this to help fix typos, clarify explanations, add code-examples and more.

Clicking the Edit This Page link will open up the page in a Github editor where you can make pages and open a new Pull Request. Once you are done, please ask the maintainer the Hacktoberfest topic to the repository or the hacktoberfest-accepted label and once merged, this will count towards your four contributions.

You can contribute to any of the following repositories:

Updating Example Projects

With the release of Neo4j 5.0 just around the corner, we have released a new set of Drivers, each of which contain new methods. We could use some help upgrading our example projects and GraphAcademy repositories to the latest version.

Updating them and testing them would be a great help.

The application development courses on GraphAcademy are backed by repositories that follow through the course step by step using branches. To update one of them it would be best to update the branch 15 with the necessary driver changes and then we could cherry pick it from there.

Good First Issues

You can search for projects with Neo4j and the Hacktoberfest label on Github. Many projects also label issues as good-first-issue or help-wanted, if you want to find such projects, you can use the following search then you need to ask the maintainer to either add a hacktoberfest-accepted label to your pull-request or add the topic to the repository.

Special Prize

At the end of the month, we’ll give out an extra goodie — a Pixoo display — for the best contribution. Tweet your pull requests at us with #hacktoberfest #neo4j and we’ll pick the winner in November.

Neo4j Online Developer Education Summit 2022

Join us for NODES 2022

Join thousands of graphistas from countries all over the world for a virtual, totally free event by developers and for developers. The 24-hour live stream is taking place on November 16 and 17 across multiple time zones, with talks featuring the most clever stories in the Neo4j Community.

Sign Up for NODES 2022 Now

folks of all experience levels are invited to contribute to their favorite open source projects.

Hacktoberfest at Neo4j was originally published in Neo4j Developer Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.