SShortSingh.
TopTechnologyAI & MLStartupsProgrammingScienceBusinessFinanceCrypto & Web3World
Back to feed
Programming

Hacktoberfest 2026 Drops PR Counts, Shifts Focus to Open-Source AI Building

0
·1 views

DigitalOcean, DEV, and Major League Hacking have announced a full partnership to co-run Hacktoberfest 2026 this October, marking the first time all three organizations share equal ownership of the event. The annual celebration, which began in 2014 as a pull-request challenge to encourage open-source contributions, is dropping its traditional PR-counting format after it led to maintainer burnout and low-quality submissions. This year's theme centers on open-weight and open-source AI, encouraging participants to build agents, fine-tune models, or make their first open-source AI contributions. Over 300 in-person community events called Fests are planned worldwide, with organizers receiving swag, programming support, and promotional backing from the partners. The shift reflects a broader belief that open AI innovation should be accessible to everyone, offering transparency and resilience amid rapid changes in AI access and policy.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Log in to join the discussion and vote.

Log in

Related stories

0
ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer Tests Hermes Agent Bot Mode With Three Specialist AI Agents

Developer Vivek Shetye published a hands-on experiment with Hermes Agent's Bot Mode, building a team of three specialist AI agents designed to hand off tasks between each other. The test focused on a research-challenge-synthesis workflow to evaluate how well AI agents can collaborate sequentially. Shetye documented what worked and what failed during the process, offering a practical assessment of the feature. He also compared Bot Mode to Hermes Agent's Kanban-style workflow to clarify where each approach is best suited. The article was published on DEV Community on August 18 as part of the Hermes Agent Challenge.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community
0
ProgrammingDEV Community ·

DEV Community Series Traces Reinforcement Learning From 1911 Psychology to Modern AI

A developer on DEV Community has published a multi-part educational series charting the chronological history of reinforcement learning (RL), from early psychological theories to contemporary algorithms. The series begins with foundational ideas such as Thorndike's Law of Effect (1911), Pavlov's reinforcement concept (1927), and Hebb's neural learning hypothesis (1949). It progresses through landmark computational milestones including Turing's pleasure-pain system (1948), Bellman's Dynamic Programming (1957), and Watkins's Q-Learning (1989). Later entries cover breakthroughs like Tesauro's TD-Gammon (1992) and the Policy Gradient Theorem (2000), which advanced modern RL theory. The series uses visual guides and real-world analogies to make complex RL concepts accessible to a broad audience.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community
0
ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Idle AWS Load Balancers Cost Up to $18/Month Each — Here Is How to Find and Remove Them

AWS Application and Network Load Balancers incur a fixed base charge of roughly $16–$18 per month regardless of whether they handle any traffic. Load balancers are often created early in a project's lifecycle but rarely deleted when the associated services are shut down, leaving orphaned resources that continue billing. Developers can identify idle load balancers by checking CloudWatch request metrics over a seven-day window and inspecting target group health via the AWS CLI. A load balancer showing near-zero requests, no healthy targets, and no DNS references pointing to it is generally safe to delete. Before removing any load balancer, teams should verify it is not serving a low-traffic but critical purpose such as a disaster-recovery endpoint or an internal admin panel.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community
0
ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Benchmarking AI Models Without Testing Their Servers Is a Critical Oversight

A software engineer writing for DEV Community argues that most AI model evaluations overlook server-side performance, focusing only on output quality. The article highlights a recurring pattern where teams select a free model based on strong demo results, integrate it into CI pipelines, and then face failures days later due to shared server infrastructure. Free-tier endpoints often involve shared tenancy, meaning latency and timeouts are affected by other users' workloads on the same hardware. To address this, the author developed a reproducible Python benchmarking harness that tests a model and its server together using concurrent requests and pass/fail metrics. The piece includes a disclosure that it was prepared as part of outreach for MonkeyCode, whose free model and server options were used in the benchmark.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community
Hacktoberfest 2026 Drops PR Counts, Shifts Focus to Open-Source AI Building · ShortSingh