The WPCouple’s #Hacktoberfest Open Source with WordPress Meetup

This Saturday Ahmad Awais along with the WPCouple Team organized a huge Hacktoberfest Event in Lahore. It was by far our best event throughout this year.

Every year at Hacktoberfest Ahmad teaches people to start contributing to open source. Add Git, GitHub, and DigitalOcean to the mix and we have a hacktoberfest. That’s what happened this time. We learned how and why Git was created by Linus Torvalds (who also created Linux). Agenda also included an introduction to the basic commands of git, it’s working, and how it can be used to collaborate and improve development workflow.

🗒 Meetup Notes

Let’s take a look at what happened at the meetup and at the end, you can find the images and other details.

🎩 Talk by Ahmad Awais

Starting with the introduction, Ahmad Awais delivered a talk on open source software, their communities, and Git. He also talked about how contributing to the open source and WordPress has changed his life. One of the things that he tried to push was to make people realize the power of open source.

Ahmad gave the example of Git and Linux. Both of them, being open source, have a huge impact on the digital world. Git gave a new way of managing the code. Linux evolved to power every other smart device (1.5 Billion Android devices and 98% of the internet).

In the latter part of his talk, he introduced the audience to the basics of the Git. While he asked everyone to check out 15 minutes GitHub learning tutorial but his talk was more focused on why to open source code than how.

I know for a fact that, Ahmad doesn’t like to spoonfeed. It’s his way of getting you to do the real work. It was all worth it. The audience was keenly engaged in the discussion and got a pretty good idea of the basic commands and working of Git. Except for the silly jokes he cracked — he also shared many useful resources with the audience.

The fun part was the intro to DigitalOcean/GitHub and the Hacktoberfest event. How everyone can create four pull requests and get a limited edition t-shirt.

❓ Q/As

Ahmad ended up talking and discussing stuff for about than two hours. He took questions during the talk as well as at the end of the talk. I’ll try to summarize the major discussion parts here:

💯 Git/GitHub: The student participants were excited to know about Git. They had queries regarding how they can start using Git and GitHub.Ahmad told everyone to have a GitHub profile if they are a dev, and to put their code online, open source it without the fear of code review.

They might end up collaborating or helping someone. He shared his 70+ open source projects and inspiring GitHub profile of an open source evangelist that he is. Check it out.

🙌 Personal Development: There were several full stack and pro developers in the audience. They had done ample amount of work in their career but never contributed to the open source. They had a healthy discussion about making their entire teams at work contribute code to the open source software.

🎯 Why is it called the “Pull Request”: Ahmad asked a fun question from us that why is it that we call it a Pull Request instead of a Push Request when in reality we are trying to push our code.

• “Push” is you forcing the changes being present in the target repository.
• “Pull” is the target repository grabbing your changes to be present there.
• A “pull request” is you requesting the target repository to please grab your changes.
• A “push request” would be the target repository requesting you to push your changes.

When you send a pull request, you’re asking (requesting) the official repo owner to pull some changes from your own repo. Hence “pull request”!

🍕 Swag & Refreshments

This event was sponsored by WPCouple, WP-Pakistan, GitHub, DigitalOcean, and Dev.to. They also sent us some swag for the audience.

It included cool stickers, t-shirts, Git cheat sheets, and Git guides. (Funny story — the Git cheatsheet got delivered after the meetup so we went on and got some printed on our own — that was a tough call). And a tasty pizza + garlic bread with soft drinks for everyone was served to the audience.

🔗 Resources

• Git in 15 minutes
• How To Create a Pull Request on GitHub (A random video explanation as well)
• GitHub Training Kit: Open source slides, workbook, and cheat sheet courseware for teaching Git and GitHub classes
• Git cheat sheets in multiple languages
• Understanding the GitHub Flow
• GitHub training sessions and webcasts
• Patchwork: Casual, mentored workshops for beginners to Git and GitHub
• More Resources From GitHub
• Open Source 101

⚡ Where to find Open Source projects to work on?

• Ahmad’s Hacktoberfest GitHub Repository: Excluding merges, 25+ contributors have pushed 130+ commits to master and 73 commits to all branches. On the master branch, 7 files have changed and there have been 227 additions and 1 deletions. All of that in less than a week.
• Find on GitHub.
• Checkout the Hacktoberfest site.

More resources and useful tips for participants on the Hacktoberfest site.

⚡ Meetup Details

• Meetup Announcement!
• TOPIC: Hacktoberfest Open Source with WordPress Meetup!
• SUB TOPICS: Git, GitHub, DigitalOcean, Personal Development
• SEATS: 50-60. TIME: 4 PM to 6 PM. DATE: Saturday — 20-Oct-2017.
• VENUE: DHA Lahore, PK. REGISTRATION: Google Form
• MEETUP.COM: Events for DigitalOcean Meetup Lahore and WordPress Meetup Lahore.

🔥 Testimonials & Feedback

We received awesome feedback comments from our audience. I’m sharing a few of the testimonials below.

💜 Moments…

And yes, it did happen! Here’re a select few (~300) pictures from this incredible event.

Better yet, click here to check all ~300 event pictures.

Cya next time! 👋