Hacktoberfest is a global movement that happens every October. It’s an initiative to encourage and challenge developers to contribute code to open source projects. As a result, the entire open source community benefits from it. And we at Chimoney have been fortunate to be a part of this amazing initiative for the first time!

So now let’s see how our participation story has made us and our community excited and enjoyed over the past month during the Hacktoberfest 2022.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is an annual event held in the month of October (Now you know why it’s called Hacktoberfest.) to celebrate open source, its benefits to community, society, and the people who connect it. The event was originally created by DigitalOcean in 2014 as a way to engage their developer community and celebrate the practice of giving back. So, yes, it is an opportunity for everyone to discover and contribute to the Repos by accepting the challenges and getting rewarded for doing so.

Chimoney’s First Hacktoberfest Experience

Chimoney is a fintech Startup, officially started the business in early 2021, and “fun” is what we love. You might think that Hacktoberfest is only limited to developers, but it isn’t. Anyone who is passionate about technology (aka. a better world) can contribute and participate in this virtual tech event, based on the challenges each community is putting. Chimoney’s Hacktoberfest was opened to both developers and non-developer friends. Like the other tech conferences we went, we make sure everyone could take part in our activities regardless of their expertise.

During the event, we invited everyone in our community and their friends to contribute to our repository on GitHub, focusing on our 2 products: ChiSpend and ChiConnect.

Our incentives

🎃 Each merged PR gets 25,000 Chimoney ($25) 🔮 Bonus! A contributor completing 4 merged PRs will get a customized Chimoney’s Hacktoberfest 2022 T-shirt.

The best part? We received warm welcomes from the community members. We have to say that our participation in this event was one of the best experiences ever.

ChiHeroes enjoyed our high collaborative culture during the Hacktoberfest.

ChiHeroes or Chimoney employees joined force to make this first Hacktoberfest memorable. Everyone, working fully remotely from different part of the world, had fun collaborating across departments. The Product squads set up the sandbox and repository with clear, inviting instructions and brainstormed the challenges for contributors to participate. The Community team members heavily promoted and encouraged the participation in this open-source project and came up with ideas for show appreciation. No one could resist our flexible gift and our t-shirts. The Client Enablement and Customer Success talents supported with responses to enquiries and approve the API requests. The Marketing lovers created the hype and kept inviting folks to participate and win Chimoney credits and cutomized swag. That said, our culture and team collaboration made this happened and made it even more fun.

Results of Hacktoberfest 2022

Our journey of Hacktoberfest is just begun. We’re more confident, and we’re building better relationships with open source communities and contributing back more than ever. In total, we have of 21 issues, 17 active contributors, 25 Merged Pull Request. Each merged PRs contributor was awarded $25 in Chimoney credit. We got one contributor with 4 merged PRs, thereby unlocking the Chimoney t-shirt reward.

Below are some creative ideas and top suggestions deliver better Chimoney:

• Chimoney map: Built by Adeleke Oluwatobi, the interactive map shows the product catalog for each country.
• Chimoney Discord Bot: Built by Awe Ayomidipupo, a community member, the Discord bot allows rewards from Chimoney to be sent via a Discord user’s DM.
• Chimoney Slack Bot: Rewards Slack users with Chimoney couldn't be easier.
• Flutter Widget Package: Built by Somto Ezenwaka, this is a package for ChiSpend Marketplace. It provides easy options to customize the marketplace using customization properties supported by ChiSpend.
• Web P2P App: Built by Abdulbaki Adabara, this is a Laravel web app that uses Chimoney's API to send gifts, momo, crypto, and airtime.
• Mobile Money Payout API: Implemented by Ezechuka Eze, this is a project that implements the ChiConnect payout functionality for mobile money payouts.
• Dev-focused articles: Two articles written by Neel shah. (1) Sending and receiving payments with Chimoney and (2) How To Integrate Mobile Apps With Chimoney!!
• ChiSpend website copy: CyberGeni proposed creative copies for sections of the ChiSpend website to improve the experience. We listeed, highly appreciated the suggestions and implemented some changes to optimize our messsges.

Takeaways from Chimoney’s #Hacktoberfest2022

Contribution is not limited to code. It can also be with documentation, bug reports, and even copywriting suggestions. Everyone starts somewhere. We’re so happy to see Chimoney community contributed from everywhere in the world. Sending rewards was super quick and easy, done by ChiPay, our bulk payout platform, and it was just loved by the winning contributors since the reward could be redeemed or cashed out to anything, from 500+ global gift cards to 1000+ bank deposits, airtime and mobile money.

Next Steps for Chimoney

We continue our repository house on GitHub to keep listening to all amazing ideas even the Hacktofest 2022 is ended. We also intend to create more projects and open source initiatives and invite more people to join us. So, always check out this repo, follow our the “Happening community” on Twitter, and go beyond to join exclusive Chimoney Community.

And yes! We would love to attend and sponsor global tech conferences or tech events to introduce Chimoney as we’re so proud what we're doing which is aligned to our mission: Unlock economic opportunity for everyone.

Final Words

Well, we love fun. How about we say making it a tradition to participate in Hacktoberfest every year and make it a part of the company culture? We strongly believe that contributing to open source projects is a great way to give back to the developer community to which we were born to serve better payout solutions for. (Assuming you've read our story.)

Got some minutes? Our folks got something to say.

Hacktoberfest Partcipants’ FeedBack

• My entire experience was great. I'm originally a developer, but the contributions I made were all no-code. My goal for this year's Hacktoberfest was to try to make direct meaningful contributions to organizations, and I was able to achieve that with the help of chimoney. ~Treasure, Chimoney Community member & Contributor

• My whole experience while contributing to the Chimoney Hacktoberfest project was great and I really loved the incentives as they motivated me and the other contributors to contribute to the issues. ~Khadeejah. ChiSquad Member & Contributor

• Chimoney participation in the Hactoberfest 2022 is an awesome move! I’m glad we didn’t not only gained new insights, ideas, and innovation from the initiative but also were able to encourage open source contributors and reward contributors with merged PRs. The Chimoney community project is available for people across the globe to contribute to afterwards. ~Omotola, Chimoney Community/DevRel Lead

• We were able to discover some bugs in ChiConnect which were raised and fixed via the Chimoney Repo. Contributors built SDKs for the Chimoney API to enable developers to integrate within their code. We were also able to see other use cases of ChiConnect API and the ChiSpend widget. ~Eloghosa, Software Engineer, Chimoney Project Mainainter