Hacktoberfest 2020 celebrated
The Developer Students Club (DSC) VAST along with FOSSers VAST jointly conducted a four-day programme to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software. The event was conducted during 17 – 20 October 2020. The event had more than 70 participants.
“Dive into OSS”
The first event was an online puzzle competition “Dive into OSS” having three rounds and spanning all the four days. The task was to crack an encrypted PDF file based on some clues and get clues out of the cracked ones to crack more files. The clues were all related to Open Source Softwares, blogs and people who helped spread free software. The event offered both a learning experience and a thrill of solving puzzles to the participants. The winner was Sreelakshmi T S of S5 B Tech CSE B who managed to crack all the files in the shortest time.
“Leapcode”
The second event was a virtual meet to promote Hacktoberfest with Leapcode. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio. The session was handled by the co- founder of Leapcode Mr Kuruvila George. The participants were given access to the beta platform of Leapcode. Leapcode is a platform which promotes open source by making it easier to contribute to it. He showed the participants how to contribute to open source software with the help of Leapcode platform. Every participant was encouraged and guided to complete the first task in the leapcode platform.
“First PR”
The next event was “First PR”. The event helped the participants to create their first pull request into a GitHub repository, hence making their first step towards Open Source contributions. A repository was created in the official DSC VAST GitHub account and the participants were given directions to make a pull request into it.
“Open Source Trivia”
The final event was “Open Source Trivia”, an online quiz competition about Free and Open Source software. The event was held on 20 October from 6pm to 12pm. The winner of the competition was Pranav Kuruppath of S5 B Tech CSE B and the first and second runner ups were Meghna Ramesh and Nishrin Noushad of S5 B Tech CSE B.
The event helped the participants to acquire an understanding of Free and Open Source Software.
