Hacktoberfest 2019 Meetup — DigitalOcean, JAMstack, & Everything Else!

We, TheDevCouple team, celebrate open source by arranging a number of interactive conferences and meetups every year. Meetups like these are opportunities for developers to meet, interact and network with the speakers and other developers. With the month of October ongoing, it was time for the yearly Hacktoberfest meetup.

🎊 Hacktoberfest

Ahmad Awais started off the talk with Hacktoberfest 2019. It is the sixth annual Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open-source software. This is the deal: You have to make a total of five Pull Requests. These contributions are open to everyone and can be done to any project on GitHub. Once you are done, you’ll receive a cool limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt and stickers.

📽 Hacktoberfest OneDevMinute

If you want to contribute to open source and participate in this Hacktoberfest, do NOT miss this #OneDevMinute by Ahmad Awais. You can improve an open-source project’s documentation, refactor code, or gift that projects a new logo design — just participate and celebrate open source this October.

🦈 Digital Ocean

After the Hacktoberfest session, Ahmad moved on to Digital Ocean. He shared why is it one of the most go-to cloud platforms for developers & teams. One can deploy, manage, and scale cloud applications faster and more efficiently with it. The audience had several queries about its differentiating features and Functions as a Service (FaaS) with Digital Ocean.

💯 Digital Ocean powers Hacktoberfest and is also a prime sponsor of this meetup.

💻 GraphQL

Next, was an introduction to GraphQL. Ahmad first shared why the concept of APIs was easier to understand but hard to explain. But he had a fun interpretation up his sleeve. Imagine you are ordering some food form a menu in a restaurant. There needs to be some link between the kitchen and your order. That link is API.

GraphQL is a language and a server-side runtime for building and querying APIs. It provides a complete description of your API. It enables you to get exactly what you asked for in the API query. Moreover, you can specify calls to multiple REST APIs in a single query which is pretty efficient.

🍯 JAMstack