Jess Lee

for Major League Hacking (MLH)

Posted on Oct 1 with Ryan Swift and Ben Halpern

Everything You Need To Know About Hacktoberfest 2026: AI Belongs to Everyone 🎃

#devchallenge #hacktoberfest #opensource #ai

MLH partnership brings beginner-friendly focus

It's October 1st, which means Hacktoberfest 2026 is officially live! 🎉

This year looks a little different. Hacktoberfest is now powered by Major League Hacking (MLH) and DEV, presented by DigitalOcean, and it's built around one idea:

AI belongs to everyone.

For the entire month, people around the world are coming together, online and in person, to discover, learn about, and build with open-source AI. Maybe you'll finally figure out what an "open-weight model" actually is. Maybe you'll catch your first livestream, try an AI tool you can run and inspect yourself, or build something with a friend at a local Fest.

Maybe you'll write your first skills.md, build an open-source agent, or fine-tune a model. Wherever you're starting from, there's a place for you this month.

Totally new to "Open-Source AI"? Here's what you need to know:

You don't need to be a developer, or to have ever touched open source, to take part in Hacktoberfest. A few quick definitions to get you going:

Open source means the code is public. Anyone can look at how a project is made, learn from it, use it, and help improve it.
Open-weight models are AI models whose "weights" (the learned knowledge that makes the model work) are publicly released, so anyone can download, run, study, and adapt them, rather than only accessing them through a company's app. Open-weight is not the same as open source.
Open-source AI tools are the building blocks around those models (agents, frameworks, and utilities) that are shared openly for anyone to use and improve.

Why does this matter? When AI is open, more people get to understand it, access it, and shape how it's used. That's what "AI belongs to everyone" is all about, and Hacktoberfest is a month-long invitation to come see for yourself.

A quick note on what's changed

When DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014, the formula was simple: open four pull requests, earn a t-shirt. That idea helped bring a whole generation of people into open source. 💜

But AI tools now make low-effort pull requests trivial to generate, and open-source maintainers have been paying the price. So this year, pull requests and merge requests no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. Instead, the focus is on learning and building together, and on open source as a philosophy of transparency and collective ownership, not a PR count.

You can read more about the thinking behind this change on the Hacktoberfest Mission page.

📒 Start your sticker book

Everything you do this month, in person or online, earns virtual stickers in your Hacktoberfest sticker book. Collect enough virtual stickers, and real ones show up in your mailbox:

Stickers collected	Reward
3	A physical Hacktoberfest sticker pack, mailed to you
10	A bonus holographic sticker added to your pack
17	You're a Hacktoberfest Completionist, with an automatic raffle entry for a Hacktoberfest t-shirt or an Arduino Uno Q board

You can earn stickers by attending a Fest, checking into livestreams, joining Global Hack Week, submitting to DEV Challenges, joining the MLH Discord, taking the pre- and post-event surveys, and more. If you use an AI coding assistant, you can also earn one by installing and logging in to DevRelay, a tool that connects DEV and MLH right inside your agent session. The full list is on the Hacktoberfest Activities page.

Start your sticker book

Once you sign in with a free MyMLH account to start your sticker book, connect your DEV account to earn your first sticker!

🏙️ Join a Fest near you

This year there are 300+ community-hosted, one-day Fests happening in 60+ countries around the world. We can't recommend going in person enough, especially if you're just getting started. There's nothing like learning alongside people who are figuring it out with you. Here's what you get when you show up:

Hacktoberfest 2026 t-shirts, stickers, and swag, available in person while supplies last.
An official participation certificate and an "Attend a Fest" virtual sticker for your sticker book.
Your people. Meet others in your community who are curious about open-source AI.
Hands-on building with real hardware. Select Hack Days have Arduinos on hand, so you can take an open-source AI project off the screen and into the physical world.

Fests come in two flavors:

Meetups: talks, workshops, panels, and time to connect with others. No project or team required, which makes them a great first step if you're new.
Hack Days: mini-hackathons where you build with open-weight models or open-source AI tools, demo at the end of the day, and compete for prizes. Come solo or bring a team.

Find a Fest

🌐 Join online

Global Hack Week: Hacktoberfest

Can't make it to a Fest? Global Hack Week: Hacktoberfest brings the energy online from Friday, October 9 (12:00 PM EDT) through Thursday, October 15 (1:00 PM EDT).

It's a free, week-long virtual hacker festival, and a welcoming place to learn at your own pace:

Daily livestreamed workshops, with recordings on YouTube if you can't catch them live
Challenges of all kinds, from social and design challenges to technical ones that earn you points
Mini-events and community hangouts in the MLH Discord

Global Hack Week counts toward your sticker book too: you can earn stickers for completing the registration challenges, checking into a livestream, and more.

DEV Challenges

We're running five challenges throughout Hacktoberfest, all with cash prizes, and each submission earns you a virtual sticker. They're a great excuse to try something new and share what you learned along the way.

Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge

We're kicking things off with a short-form weekend challenge. The prompt drops in just a few hours, and you'll have the weekend to build and submit.

Timezone	Launch Time (Local)	Submissions Due (Local)
PDT	Thursday, Oct 1 at 7:00 PM	Sunday, Oct 4 at 11:59 PM
EDT	Thursday, Oct 1 at 10:00 PM	Monday, Oct 5 at 2:59 AM
GMT	Friday, Oct 2 at 2:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 6:59 AM
CEST	Friday, Oct 2 at 4:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 8:59 AM
IST	Friday, Oct 2 at 7:30 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 12:29 PM
JST	Friday, Oct 2 at 11:00 AM	Monday, Oct 5 at 3:59 PM
AEST	Friday, Oct 2 at 12:00 PM	Monday, Oct 5 at 4:59 PM

Open-Source AI Challenges: Weeks 1–4

After the weekend, we're inviting you to explore and build with open-source AI every week. Each week has its own theme:

Round	Dates
Week 1	October 5–11
Week 2	October 12–18
Week 3	October 19–25
Week 4	October 26–31

Pro tip: Week 1 wraps up right as Global Hack Week gets going, so the workshops you catch at GHW are perfect fuel for your Week 2 submission. 😉

Follow the #hf26challenge tag to see what everyone's making, and register early for each challenge so you don't miss any announcements.

DevRelay

We just launched something cool.

If you build with an AI coding agent, DevRelay connects it to DEV and MLH. Your agent knows which challenge or hackathon you've entered, helps you build for it, and lets you submit without leaving your session.

It can also get you partner coupons from MLH while you build, and we're adding more partners over time, so you can often deploy for free. Install it and log in to earn a sticker for your sticker book. 🎃

Get DevRelay

💜 Thank you to our sponsors

Hacktoberfest 2026 is presented by DigitalOcean and made possible by our sponsors: Tiger Data, Snowflake, MongoDB, Gauge, Solana, Render, GitHub, Sentry, Backboard.io, IBM, ElevenLabs, Paper Compute, Entire, Prior Labs, Google Cloud, Gemma, Qualcomm, Arduino, Mastra, Temporal, TLDR, and Thinking Machines.

Questions?

Check out the Hacktoberfest FAQ or reach out to hacktoberfest@mlh.io. For questions about a specific Fest, use the "Contact Host" button on its event page.

However you show up this month, whether you're curious, brand new, or a seasoned open-source contributor, we're so glad you're here. AI belongs to everyone. Let's explore it together. 🎃

Happy Hacktoberfest!