Open Source Day 2021 Recap
A couple weeks ago, the WildFly Elytron team had a great time participating in Open Source Day, an all-day hackathon that took place during the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration (vGHC). This was the WildFly Elytron team’s second time participating in this event, after having been a part of the recent Summer Open Source Day as well. Once again, we were thrilled to see participants, project representatives, and mentors come together from all over the globe for this virtual event. The goal of Open Source Day is to guide participants through making contributions to open source projects.
How the day went
From the very beginning of the day, we could tell that this would be an even larger event than the Summer Open Source Day. We kicked things off with some introductory comments from Caitlyn Georger, the event program manager, and Rocio Montes, the chair of the event. It was then time to introduce our WildFly Elytron team members and mentors. Open Source Day mentors are volunteers who assist participants with their contributions for a particular project throughout the day. We were lucky to have 4 mentors join our WildFly Elytron team members to help our participants. We were also delighted that one of these mentors was actually one of our participants during the Summer Open Source Day!
After the initial introductions, it was time to jump into an overview of our project. We then covered some general information on how to submit pull requests against the wildfly-elytron repository. After that, it was time to start the hackathon!
Prior to the event, we had created a bunch of issues and triaged existing ones that would be suitable for anyone getting started on the WildFly Elytron project. We made sure that the descriptions of these issues had useful pointers for tackling the tasks. We also added the "good-first-issue" label to these issues to make them easy to spot. We shared this list of issues with participants and helped them pick which ones to work on.
Throughout the day, the WildFly Elytron team members and mentors helped participants set up their development environment, answered questions about Git and the process of submitting and updating pull requests, helped participants work on their issues, and provided feedback on their pull requests. There was also some time for general questions about working on open source projects. We ended the day with several pull requests submitted from first time contributors (we actually doubled our numbers from the Summer Open Source Day)!
Some thoughts from our first time contributors and mentors
The WildFly Elytron team thoroughly enjoyed being a part of this event! It was a great way to end the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration. What did some of our first time contributors and mentors think of the day? Here’s what they had to say:
I would like to say that as a student that just finished her 2nd year in software engineering in security I learned a lot about cyber security and what potential work I could be doing in the future. In the short time I was on call with the team, everyone was so supportive and I felt welcome even though I didn’t have a lot of knowledge. I really appreciate that as someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience. Working with individuals in the industry is a great privilege because I get to learn skills I wouldn’t otherwise learn in the classroom! I hope to keep contributing to the wildfly elytron repository as a novice in this field!
-Suha Siddiqui, Open Source Day participant
Before participating in the Open Source Day, I had no idea how contributing to Open Source works. Everything seemed so complicated that I was seriously doubting I would be able to make a contribution. Luckily, mentors of the WildFly Elytron team answered all of my questions and helped me navigate my way through GitHub. In the end, I learned how the whole process of contributing to projects looks like and was able to push several commits of my own to the project!
-Yana Z., Open Source Day participant
It was my first time mentoring for an Open Source Day event, and I couldn’t have asked for a better team. Every team member of Wildfly Elytron was humble and provided their technical expertise on navigating through docs, setting up the project locally, and sharing tips on how to be a successful OSD mentor. I enjoyed my time working with WildFly Elytron folks and hope to contribute more in the future!
-Purva Singh, Open Source Day mentor
It was an amazing experience for me to work with all the mentors. It was a first time experience for me as a mentor in Open Source Day. That helps me to upskill myself. Also I learned a lot about next generation security applications through the wildfly-elytron project with the support of you guys. I’m exploring more about this project and looking forward to start contributing to this project.
-Amulya Dixit , Open Source Day mentor
I first worked with Farah, Ashpan, Sonia, and Diana during OSD summer. Their enthusiasm encouraged me to make my first open-source contributions over the summer. To contribute back to the community, I decided to come back to the Wildly Elytron project as a mentor during vGHC 2021. It was gratifying introducing people to open source development while learning more about the project from the team. Along with more technical details, the team’s approach towards introducing open-source development to new contributors is something I’ll take away from this event.
-Stuti Misra, Open Source Day mentor
What’s next?
The WildFly Elytron project is participating in Hacktoberfest this month and welcomes your contributions! Check out this blog post for all the details on how to get started with our project.