#Hacktoberfest 2018: Thank you!

It feels like we just announced our participation, but Hacktoberfest 2018 has officially come to a close.

On behalf of my team and everyone at Microsoft, we thank each and every one of you for your contributions. Your response and enthusiasm blew us away, with participants ranging from long-time Microsoft community members to people completely new to our ecosystem (over 70% participants were first-time Microsoft project contributors!).

I was particularly excited by the breadth of community member participation – from documentation to samples and core code, and across large-scale projects like .NET Core, Xamarin, Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Service Fabric, Draft, and dozens of smaller projects we sponsor and maintain. Thanks for bringing your unique expertise and perspective to improve the community.

I also want to recognize our friends, DigitalOcean, GitHub, and twilio, for running Hacktoberfest and demonstrating their leadership in growing and celebrating open source around the world.

We’re currently in the process of reviewing all submissions, and everyone who completed our Hacktoberfest challenge will receive a limited edition T-shirt, designed Ashley McNamara, Cloud Developer Advocate and graphic designer.

T-shirt design by @AshleyMcNamara

Participants who met all the requirements will receive an email in the next 2-3 weeks with a redemption code, information from our fulfillment partner’s website, and shipping instructions. We appreciate your patience – they’re coming soon!

Open source lives and breathes community, and it’s thriving thanks to the all the individual developers like you who contribute code, documentation, and much more to millions of projects every single day. We hope you continue to participate in the communities and projects that sparked your interest in October.

Anything you’d like to see Hacktoberfest next year? Let us know in the comments.

More on Microsoft + Open Source projects here.

Jeff McAffer

Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft, where he and the team are helping to drive the company’s transition to an “open source engagement first” model. He was one of the founders of the Eclipse open source project where he was an active community leader, core contributor, book author, and frequent conference speaker.

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