kubefirst Participates in Its First Hacktoberfest

Since the creation of kubefirst in 2017, the company has made gigantic strides in the cloud native space, constantly making it easier to create production-ready Kubernetes clusters. The team has grown and the project has seen major releases, now providing a great experience right out of the box: your own GitOps-based Kubernetes cluster production-ready with the open source tools you like.

Since going open source in 2021, we’ve upped our game with better ways to communicate with our community, more transparency around our roadmap, implementation of GitHub management best practices, and clearer informational documentation. We’ve reached a point where we now feel confident to participate in such a great event like Hacktobest.

Before Contributing to kubefirst

Firstly, to participate in any projects, not just ours, first read the Hacktoberfest guidelines as you need to register.

Once it’s done, if it’s not the case already, you probably want to familiarize yourself with our platform. A good way to learn more about kubefirst, is to check the documentation, and you probably want to test the most prominent features locally by following this tutorial using our k3d support. With that, you don’t need to pay for any cloud infrastructure to test our platform, but you can also choose one of the supported clouds like AWS and Civo. We also support DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Vultr in beta, for now.

At any time, if there is anything, ask any questions or share any issues with kubefirst in the #helping-hands channel in our Slack community. If you liked what you see, feel free to give a star to our repository to show us some love.

Get Your Hands Dirty

Once you are more familiar with the platform, you’re good to lurk around the good first issue also labeled hacktoberfest. We selected the issues that would be easier to fix, and features that would be possible to implement when you are starting to contribute to our project, and are not familiar yet with our codebase. Once you find the issue for you, there are two main things you should do before even working on the code:

1. Read the CONTRIBUTING file to know how to get started.
2. Discuss your plan for resolving the issue or adding a feature with us either in the issue directly, or in the #contributors channel in our Slack community (which is also a great place for any questions related to your contribution). This step is critical as we may be able to help you and save you some time with the solution’s choice. Oh, and let us know you are participating in Hacktoberfest so we label your PR properly.

Keep in mind since our product is tackling all the complexity for the users so the final solution we offer is a tool that is easy to use, our project is complex, involving multiples moving pieces, so never-ever be afraid to ask any questions about how it’s working, or asking help to debug an issue in the #contributors channel in our Slack community. If for whatever reason you prefer not asking questions in public, ping me (Fred on Slack) directly, and I’ll be more than happy to help.

Open Source Contributions Is More Than Just Code

We couldn’t be happier to see that Hacktoberfest considers non-code contributions as valid ones: it is also in our core beliefs that every open contribution is worthy, and that you deserve to be called a contributor as much as anyone else. As much work as we put in the documentation in the last months, we still have a lot of work to do (good first issues), and would welcome any help.

You will notice there are not a lot of those: contributing to the documentation requires an intrinsic knowledge of our platform, and for most issues, demands great skills with the tools we are using (i.e., Argo CD, HashiCorp Terraform/Vault…). The good thing though is that most issues are specific to one technology. So feel free to look around the other issues, just let us know which one you want to sharpen your teeth on first. As for the code-side of things, I advise you to read the CONTRIBUTING file, which contains different information from the kubefirst repository one.

Thank You

Note that in the last years the Hacktoberfest organization has been working hard to minimize spam contributions, so please be sure to read all information on the event site, and that your contribution to kubefirst will warrant a hacktoberfest-accepted label, and not a spam or invalid one.

No matter which issues you will tackle, we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Being an open source company isn’t always easy, but it’s with people like you that we can move forward with a successful project. We work hard every day to make the best platform out there, and care about our community, which you are now part of new friend 🫶