After a gap of almost three years, the gathering of humans passionate about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) took place at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NIT) Campus. The event FOSSMeet'23 spanned three days from the 10th of February to the 12th of February 2023 and brought together an amazing panel of speakers. Moreover, the event enabled student developers to kickstart their FOSS journey. The Hoppscotch team also took part in FOSSMeet where Mr. Andrew Bastin, our Chief Technology Officer took part in a panel discussion as well as told the story of how Hoppscotch scaled to millions of users from its humble beginnings as a FOSS project!

The event was inaugurated by Dr. Sasi Kumar, a Free Software activist and a member of the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation of India. He spoke about the importance of FOSS projects and how we should collectively work towards using FOSS to solve real-world problems. The inauguration was followed by the story of simple.org by Prabhanshu Gupta. Mr. Gupta told the story of how they empowered over 9000 public healthcare organizations. Simple provides a digital platform to help record patient data enabling the effective treatment of patients with hypertension.

Later in the evening, a panel discussion sparked about the Future of FOSS. The panel consisted of Andrew Bastin - Chief Technology Officer at Hoppscotch, Devdutt Shenoi - Software Engineer at Bytebeam, Gokul Soumya - an undergraduate student from Sree Chitra Thirunal College of Engineering and a core contributor to the Helix text editor, and Abraham Raji - a free software developer and a Debian developer. All of the panelists talked about how they got started with free and open-source software and how they made their first contribution. All of the panelists agreed that the future of free and open-source software is bright and FOSS will continue to empower both developers and non-developers to solve problems through the power of communities. The events for the first day wrapped up with the panel discussion and an open lab session where attendees developed collaborative art using turtle.

Day two of FOSSMeet brought in speakers like Dr. Deepika K who provided the attendees a much more clarity into the world of free software and open source and Dr. Akshay S Dinesh who spoke about FOSS philosophy and how FOSS empowers people to solve problems in our society. The second half of Day two consisted of a workshop on NeST - a python package to emulate real-life networks, a workshop on the Rust programming language, and another parallel track on self-hosting a cloud infrastructure.

The first part of the third and final day had lightning talks by various speakers. Gopikrishan Sasikumar delivered how AI can be used for solving regional problems. Abraham Raji introduced Debian GNU/Linux to the attendees and Subin Siby talked about how he contributes to large FOSS projects. Our own Andrew Bastin told the story of how Hoppscotch started as a side project and grew to become one of the most adored open-source products. Mr.Bastin conveyed the vision that the Hoppscotch team is working towards and moved on to how he made his first contribution to Hoppscotch. He also explained the core philosophies that guide Hoppscotch,

1. Be Inclusive - Make Hoppscotch available everywhere with low friction and welcome users irrespective of their experience/skill level.
2. Be Integrated - Make Hoppscotch helpful in every aspect of API development and integration
3. The Open Source Heart - Give back to the OSS community which fuelled the growth of the project

Hoppscotch has reached the place where it is now because of the contributions and love of the open-source community. We’re working very hard to make Hoppscotch the best API testing tool out there. We’ll be sharing more updates on our Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

You can follow Hoppscotch on Twitter @hoppscotch_io to get our latest updates. We’d love to see your contributions to Hoppscotch, you can get started by checking out our GitHub repository here.