Hacktoberfest started today, and if you have taken part before, the first thing to know is that the rule everyone remembers is gone. Pull requests no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. There is no PR target and no PR-based swag this year.
That is a good change. It is also a slightly awkward one if Hacktoberfest was the push you needed to make your first open source contribution. This post covers what changed, why a first PR is still worth making, and a 7-day challenge we built: one small task a day, 5 to 15 minutes each, and each one ends with a real pull request that a maintainer reviews.
What changed in Hacktoberfest 2026
From the official FAQ:
Pull requests and merge requests will no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. It’s easier than ever to submit low-effort spam PRs to projects, so we’re listening to maintainer feedback and no longer actively incentivizing PRs.
The rest of the event changed with it:
- New organizers. MLH and DEV run Hacktoberfest this year, in partnership with DigitalOcean.
- New format. 300+ in-person and online community events, focused on hands-on building and learning with open-source AI and open-weight models. The in-person ones are called Fests.
- New rewards. You collect stickers. Two are required: sign in with MyMLH and add your mailing address. You earn more by checking in at a Fest, entering the code shown during a livestream, or submitting to a DEV Challenge. Fifteen stickers enter you in a raffle for a Hacktoberfest t-shirt or an Arduino Uno Q board (details on the online participation page).
If you maintain a repo, you know why. Every October, maintainers spent hours closing pull requests that changed one word in a README, and AI tools made those PRs even cheaper to produce. Taking the swag off the PR removes the main reason to send them.
Why your first PR still matters
The spam was the problem, not the pull request. The things a first contribution teaches you did not change:
- Forking, branching and keeping a fork in sync without breaking it.
- Reading a codebase you did not write, well enough to change one thing in it.
- Running a project's tests before a reviewer has to tell you they fail.
- Writing a PR description that a busy maintainer can approve in one read.
- Taking review feedback and pushing a fix to the same branch.
Those are daily skills in any DevOps or platform job. A merged PR in a public repo is also evidence of them, which a line on a CV is not.
What you need is a project that wants small contributions, says exactly how to make them, and reviews them. So we made one.
The challenge: one small PR a day for 7 days
The DevOps Daily Hacktoberfest challenge is 7 daily tasks, plus a bonus, in the devops-daily repo: an open source DevOps learning site with 560+ posts, 45 quizzes and 27 flashcard decks, all stored as Markdown and JSON in the repo. Each day has its own page with the file to change and an example, and most days include a command to check your work.
To be clear about what this is: it is a DevOps Daily challenge that runs during Hacktoberfest, not an official Hacktoberfest event, and these PRs do not count toward Hacktoberfest stickers. What you get is a real contribution, reviewed by a maintainer, with a test suite in CI, on your GitHub profile. The first challenge PRs came in within hours.
Set up once (about 10 minutes)
You need Git, Node.js 22.13.1 or later (below 25), and pnpm 10.
# Fork https://github.com/The-DevOps-Daily/devops-daily on GitHub first, then:
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/devops-daily.git
cd devops-daily
git remote add upstream https://github.com/The-DevOps-Daily/devops-daily.git
pnpm install
pnpm test # the unit tests CI runs on every PR
Before each day's task, start a new branch from a fresh copy of main, so your PR contains only that day's change. Change the day number each time:
git fetch upstream
git checkout -b hacktoberfest/day-1 upstream/main
The one exception is Day 7, which adds to your Day 1 profile. If your Day 1 PR is not merged yet, branch from your Day 1 branch instead.
The 7 days
Day 1: Add yourself to the experts directory (5 min). Create a Markdown profile in content/experts/ with your name, a short bio and how people can reach you. It is the smallest possible PR, and it shows you the whole fork, branch, commit, push and PR flow once before the content gets harder.
Day 2: Add your favorite DevOps tool (5 min). Add one entry to the toolbox page: name, one-line description, link and category. Pick a tool you use, not one you have heard of. The description is where your experience shows.
Day 3: Add a quiz question (5 min). Add a question to one of the existing quizzes in content/quizzes/. The tests check every question's shape, so run them before you push. Write the explanation for the wrong answers too: "why not B" teaches more than "why A".
Day 4: Add a flashcard (5 min). Add one or two cards to a deck in content/flashcards/. A good card has one fact on the front and the shortest complete answer on the back.
Day 5: Share a tip (10 min). Add a gotcha or "thing I wish I knew" to an existing post or guide. This is the first day where you edit someone else's writing, so add your tip where a reader needs it and leave the rest of the post alone.
Day 6: Find and fix something (10 min). Browse devops-daily.com and find a typo, a broken link, a deprecated command or a formatting problem. Fix exactly one thing, and put the URL where you found it in the PR description.
Day 7: Share your stack (15 min). Add a "My Stack" section to the profile you made on Day 1: what you run, why you picked it, and what you would change.
Bonus: Build something (30+ min). A full quiz on a topic that is not covered yet, a tool comparison, a production checklist, or for the ambitious, an interactive game or simulator.
How to get your PR merged (and not closed as spam)
The 2026 change is a good reminder of what maintainers are tired of. These habits make a PR easy to review in any project, not only this one:
- One change per PR. If you spot a typo in another quiz while doing Day 3, fix it in a separate PR. A small diff is quick to check.
-
Run the tests first. Run
pnpm testbefore you push, so you find a failing check before a reviewer does. - Say what and why. Two sentences: what you changed, and why it is correct. For a fix, add the link to where you found the problem.
- Read what you submit. If an AI tool helped you write a quiz question or a tip, check it like you would check a stranger's code. A confident wrong answer in a quiz is worse than no question.
- Answer review on the same branch. Push the fix to the same branch and the PR updates. Do not open a new PR for each round.
Collect your Hacktoberfest stickers too
The challenge and the official event go together well. Do one small PR a day here, and collect your stickers at hacktoberfest.com: check in at a Fest near you, enter the code during a livestream, or submit to a DEV Challenge, since DEV co-runs the event this year.
Start with Day 1 today: devops-daily.com/hacktoberfest. And if you get stuck on any day, open an issue on the repo or ask in your PR. Questions are contributions too.
