Welcome to Astro Docs Week! All week, our docs maintainers are taking over Astro’s Twitter account. We’ll be sharing docs updates and fun from the community, so make sure you’re following us!

To kick things off, let’s take a moment to talk about Astro Docs and Hacktoberfest. We love to celebrate Astro’s amazing open-source contributors. Here’s how Hacktoberfest helped us do that.

Astro’s documentation website is open source and driven by our community. Our 270+ contributors make it easier for you to use Astro every day and we couldn’t do it without them! So this year, we wanted to use Hacktoberfest as a chance to recognize the work they do.

Hacktoberfest is an annual event run by Digital Ocean to encourage open-source participation. Every October, people who sign up can see their PRs rewarded with a t-shirt — or have a tree planted in their name! For the first time, this year’s edition welcomed low or non-code contributions. How could we say no to a forest of docs contributions?

Planting the seed

For us, contributions come in all shapes and sizes. From typo fixes and CSS tweaks, to bigger documentation improvements. But that’s not all! Astro’s Docs are available in 10 languages thanks to our tireless translators. That’s where we decided to focus our efforts this month.

In line with Hacktoberfest’s low-code focus, we wanted to encourage new translations. But we can’t merge translations without reviews from our multilingual community. It might not be obvious, but a good PR review is as valuable as the PR itself. To recognize this, we made it possible to get Hacktoberfest credit for reviewing PRs. Then we let folks know our plans on Discord and Twitter, sat back, and waited…

So, how did it go?

Drum roll please… Astro’s docs merged more than 130 PRs from 58 unique contributors as part of this year’s Hacktoberfest! This includes 41 first-time contributors to the docs repo. 🎉

As we had hoped, more than half of these PRs were translation-related. And, along the way:

• Someone sped up our CI tests.
• Our awesome Spanish team battled against incoming PRs to maintain “translation inbox zero.” (In fact, they’re likely translating this blog post as you read this!)
• Deploy guides for Deno Deploy and GitHub Pages got a once over.
• A new contributor submitted an epic, seven-page Russian translation.
• A bug in our docs Discord bot got squashed.
• Our community made improvements across all our languages.
• One contributor submitted seven translation reviews.
• And did typos get fixed? You bet!

Thank you so much to everyone who took part! We welcomed new contributors, but were just as happy to see our existing contributors join in the fun, too. We hope you all enjoyed participating in Hacktoberfest as much as we did.

Hacktoberfest is over, but Open Source is for life

Are you interested in getting involved with Astro’s Docs? You can always find us in the docs repo on GitHub or in the #docs channel on Discord. Can’t wait to meet you and merge your PR!