12/03/2023

My experience @ FOSS Hack 3.0

Location: RV University, Bangalore

FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software. So it’s a hackathon organized by FOSS United, where students and professionals collaborated to promote and build free open-source software. In this hackathon, you can showcase your FOSS project or contribute to someone else’s. There was also another option, where you could contribute to partner projects. These were projects from FOSS Partners i.e Listmonk, Excalidraw, ToolJet, etc.

I decided to contribute to Listmonk as a part of the hackathon. I had two reasons to take up this project. One with Kailash Nadh being the project mentor. Second because it’s backend was in Golang.

So I went through the GitHub issues that I could take up. Circled down a few, but there were couple of high-priority-good-first-issue ones. Like there was this one issue, where Listmonk users needed a Swagger Collection of APIs, to create server stubs and get started with development quickly. It seemed a good first issue and I started working on it.

Day 1

I reached the venue at 9, had breakfast, and started hacking. We were given a classroom for hacking. I sat with a couple of folks(Shrijith and Athreya from Hexmos) who I had met in monthly meetups. They were working on Plain text-based REST Client. More about this later in the post.

I listed down all endpoints and wrote a swagger collection for them. Easy-peasy. But I had to test them, so I started demo-app and demo-db, and tested them using HTTP Client. It worked for some requests, some had issues, so I had to fix them. In between, I went to Kailash for some guidance on a few endpoints, because they had Custom SQL Query in Request body. And apart from passing type as string, there was no other validation. I finished this by Day 1 and went to get some shut-eye.

Day 2

I woke up at 6, and started cleaning up the .yaml file. Once I finished this, I was bored as I didn’t have much to do. So I thought I will contribute to Lama2, the plain text-based REST Client. I sat across them, so I knew what they were upto. They were building VS Code extension for Lama2. They had listed 5-6 features that they wanted to build. I jumped on and took up a feature. Within a couple of hours, we had the feature ready. Before creating a PR, I took some time to add docs and test in every possible way. Later we went for lunch and started thinking about how to present and explain everything we have done in a video format. Post-lunch it was all about updating README, creating a video explaining product features, and fixing up bugs. And finally, at 5 we submitted the project on the Hackathon Submission page. At last we bid goodbye and left for home.

Summary

It’s always great to attend hackathons and work on something you’re passionate about. Contributing to open-source software is a great way to give back to the community and learn new skills. The FOSS Hack 2023 seemed like a great opportunity to collaborate with other like-minded individuals and contribute to some interesting projects. It’s great to see organizations like FOSS United promoting and building free open-source software.

Shoutout to FOSS United, Kailash, Shrijith, and Athreya for letting me contribute and hack around with your projects. Had a great time, and the weekend was well spent.