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Mold as the open-source high performance linker continues its ascent in working to prove itself as a viable alternative to LLVM's LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.6 is out today with the latest fixes and features...

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Our open source startup journey Navaneeth PK Wed, 10/19/2022 - 03:00

ToolJet is an open source, low-code framework for rapidly building and deploying internal tools. Our codebase is 100% JavaScript and TypeScript.

A lone developer in April 2021 started ToolJet. The public beta launched in June 2021 and was an instant hit. With this traction, ToolJet raised funding, and currently, we have a team of 20 members.

Why open source?

Before working on ToolJet, I worked with a few enterprise clients as a consultant. Many of these clients were large enough to build and maintain dozens of internal tools. Despite the constant requests from sales, support, and operations teams to add more features and fix the bugs in their internal tools, engineering teams struggled to find the bandwidth to work on the internal utilities.

I tried using a few platforms to build and maintain internal tools. Most of these tools were very expensive, and frequently, they didn't really fit the requirements. We needed modifications, and most utilities didn't support on-premise hosting.

As a Ruby developer, I primarily used ActiveAdmin and RailsAdmin to build internal tools. Both utilities are amazing, but making them work with more than one data source is difficult. I then realized there is a need in the market for a framework that could build user interfaces and connect to multiple data sources. I believe any tool built for developers should be open source. Most of the tools and frameworks that developers use daily result from people from all over the world collaborating in public.

The first commit

Building something like ToolJet needed a full-time commitment. Selling one of my side projects gave me a runway of 5-6 months, and I immediately started working on an idea I'd had in mind for at least two years.

The first commit (rails new) of ToolJet was on April 1, 2021.

Wait! I said the codebase is 100% JavaScript. Continue reading to discover why.

Building and pitching investors

I sat in front of my screens for most of April and May, coding and pitching to investors for a pre-seed round.

My work also included creating the drag-and-drop application builder, documenting everything, ensuring there was documentation for setting ToolJet up on popular platforms, creating a website, creating posters and blog posts for launch, and more. The process went well without any major challenges. At this point, the frontend of ToolJet was built using React, with the backend using Ruby on Rails.

While the coding was going well, investor pitches weren't going great. I sent around 40 cold emails to venture capitalist firms and "angel investors" focused on early-stage funding. While most of them ignored the email, some shared their reason for rejection, and some scheduled a call.

Most of the calls were the same; I couldn't convince them of an open source business model.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources The launch

June 7th was the day of the launch. First, we launched on ProductHunt. Six hours passed, and there were only 70 new signups. But we were trending as the #1 product of the day (and ended up as the #3 product of the week). For posterity, here's the original post.

I also posted on HackerNews around 6 PM, and within an hour, the post was #1. I was very happy that many visitors signed up and starred the repository. Many of these visitors and users reported bugs in the application and documentation. Within eight hours of posting on HN, more than 1,000 GitHub users starred ToolJet's GitHub repository, and there were hundreds of signups for ToolJet cloud. The trend continued for three days, and the repo had 2.4k stars.

Image by:

GitHub StarTrack for ToolJet. (Navaneeth PK, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Getting funding

The traction on GitHub was enough to be noticed by the venture capitalist (VC) world. The days following the launch were packed with calls. We had other options, but did not consider seriously consider them, including:

• Bootstrapping: During the early stages of the product, it was hard to find paying customers, and I did not have enough savings to fund the project until that happened.
• Building as a side project: While this strategy works great for smaller projects, I didn't feel it would work for ToolJet because we needed to create dozens of integrations and UI widgets before the platform could become useful for customers. As a side project, it might take months or years to achieve that.

I knew it could take months to build the platform I wanted if ToolJet became just a side project. I wanted to accelerate growth by expanding the team, and VC funding was the obvious choice, given the traction.

The good news is that we raised $1.55 million in funding within two weeks of the HN launch.

Stack matters in open source

Soon after the launch, we found that many people wanted to contribute to ToolJet, but they were mostly JavaScript developers. We also realized that for a framework like ToolJet that in the future should have hundreds of data source connectors, only a plugin-based architecture made sense. We decided to migrate from Ruby to TypeScript in August 2021. Even though this took about a month and significant effort, this was one of the best decisions we've made for the project. Today, we have an extensible plugin-based architecture powered by our plugin development kit. We have contributions from over 200 developers. We've written extensively about this migration here and here.

Launching v1.0

Many users have been using ToolJet on production environments since August, and the platform did not show any stability or scalability issues. We were waiting to wrap up the developer platform feature before we called it v1.0. The ToolJet developer platform allows any JavaScript developer to build and publish plugins for ToolJet. Developers are now able to make connectors for ToolJet. Creating a ToolJet connector can take just 30 minutes, including integration tests.

Building a growing community Image by:

ToolJet Star History (Navaneeth PK, CC BY-SA 4.0)

We didn't spend money on marketing. Most of our efforts in spreading the news about ToolJet have been writing about our learnings and being active in developer communities. We have a team of three members who take care of community queries.

The business model

ToolJet won't be a sustainable business without a commercial product to pay the bills. We've built an enterprise edition of ToolJet, for which customers must pay. There's no limit on usage for the free community edition, and additional features in the enterprise edition are relevant only to large teams. We have very large companies as paying customers right now, but we haven't started monetizing ToolJet aggressively. We have enough money left in the bank to build an even better ToolJet, so our focus currently is on product improvement.

What's next?

We frequently release better versions of ToolJet with the help of constant feedback and contributions from the open source community. Many major improvements and dozens of connectors and UI components are in progress. We're moving faster than ever towards our initial goal of being the open framework that can connect to hundreds of data sources and build even the most complicated user interfaces!

Here's how the open source project, ToolJet, achieved 13,000 stars and 200 contributors in a year's time.

Image by:

Greg Rakozy via Unsplash

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How to contribute to Hacktoberfest 2022 Benny Ifeanyi … Wed, 10/19/2022 - 03:00

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration run by DigitalOcean to celebrate and give back to open source projects and software. The initiative is open to everyone, and the goal is to encourage everyone in our global community to contribute to open source. In this article, I'll answer frequently asked questions about how to participate. I'll also discuss how to contribute to both code and non-code issues.

• Why should I participate in Hacktoberfest?
• How do I sign up for Hacktoberfest?
• How can I contribute to Hacktoberfest?
• How do I get started in Hacktoberfest?
• Find open source projects participating in Hacktoberfest
• Find non-code issues at Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest started in 2013 with 700 participants, and since then, the initiative has grown. In 2021, DigitalOcean recorded over 141,000 participants with over 294,451 accepted pull requests.

Why should I participate in Hacktoberfest?

Everyone relies on open source projects today. This initiative is a way of giving back, thanking the maintainers and contributors of these projects, and celebrating these projects.

Besides, contributing to open source projects comes with many benefits, from real-world exposure and community recognition to learning how to collaborate while networking, upskilling, getting a tree planted in your name, and getting a Hacktoberfest t-shirt.

Yes, the first 40,000 participants (maintainers and contributors) who get at least four pull requests accepted before the deadline get a tree planted in their name or the Hacktoberfest 2022 t-shirt.

How do I sign up for Hacktoberfest?

Everyone is welcome regardless of experience or skill, whether it's your first or ninth time. To participate, head over to Hacktoberfest.com and start hacking. ("Hacking" in this context refers to hacking at code or any given task, and not breaking into somebody's computer.)

You can register anytime in October between September 26 and October 31.

It's a free event, and there's a lot of freedom in participating in the event. Of course, that also means there's responsibility. Like any community, Hacktoberfest has rules. You can get banned if you disobey these rules, such as contributing spammy pull requests or disrupting pull requests made by others. To learn more about the rules, check out the official website.

How can I contribute to Hacktoberfest?

Open source isn't just for developers and people who code. It's for everyone! Hacktoberfest has recently started accepting no-code and low-code contributions, so everyone is included.

You can contribute in various ways, including:

• Making code contributions
• Resolving an issue
• Writing and translating technical documentation
• Introducing a new feature in an existing open source project
• Designing, video production and editing, and graphic design
• Advocacy by podcasts, case studies, blog posts, or social media posts

However, you should know that Hacktoberfest prioritizes quality over quantity.

How do I get started in Hacktoberfest?

I wrote a post a year back on how you can contribute to open source projects. It was the first time I heard about "open source" as anything but just a buzzword. Since then, I've contributed to NumPy and docToolchain docs.

All you need to get started in Hacktoberfest is a GitHub or GitLab account, a little knowledge of Git, the desire to contribute, and a repository looking for contributors.

Though Hacktoberfest accepts every form of contribution, each contribution must be made through a pull request to a public, unarchived repository and merged by the repository maintainer. This approach makes it easy for Hacktoberfest to track contributions. To do that, you must learn to use Git.

More on Git What is Git? Git cheat sheet Markdown cheat sheet New Git articles How can I learn Git?

GitHub and GitLab are public code hosting services that use Git, an open source version control system that allows multiple people to contribute to a project simultaneously. You may find these articles helpful:

• What is Git?
• How to create a pull request in GitHub

Find open source projects participating in Hacktoberfest

Some projects and maintainers get listed during the onboarding and participate in Hacktoberfest. These repositories get tagged with the "Hacktoberfest" label so contributors can easily find them.

To contribute, you need to find these labeled repositories and make some Hacktoberfest contributions.

Use GitHub/GitLab topics to find Hacktoberfest projects

Topics are a great place to get started:

• GitHub Hacktoberfest topics
• GitLab Hacktoberfest topics

Just search for "Hacktoberfest." You can filter the search results by language if you want to contribute to a project using a specific programming language.

Image by:

(Iheagwara Ifeany, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Try a search using GitHub search syntax. For example, searching using this syntax label:hacktoberfest is:issue is:open no:assignee on GitHub gives you a list of repositories labeled with "Hacktoberfest" with open issues that have not been assigned to anyone for resolution.

Image by:

(Iheagwara Ifeany, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ruth Ikegah made a video a couple of days ago about using the GitHub search syntax.

Find non-code issues at Hacktoberfest

Try GitHub syntax by using is:design or is:documentation in your search. The result is a list of repositories labeled "Hacktoberfest" with open documentation or design issues that have not been assigned.

Contribute to Hacktoberfest as a technical writer

• Looking for projects in need of a blog post? Use label:hacktoberfest is:issue is:open no:assignee is:blog
• Would you rather write or translate documentation? Use label:hacktoberfest is:issue is:open no:assignee is:documentation

Contribute to Hacktoberfest as a designer

• For UI issues, use label:hacktoberfest is:issue is:open no:assignee is:UI
• For design issues, use label:hacktoberfest is:issue is:open no:assignee is:design

Start hacking at Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is a great way to give back to the open source community. It's your chance to contribute and get involved. Be respectful when contributing, don't make spammy pull requests, and start hacking!

Participating in Hacktoberfest is a great way to get involved with the open source community wherever you are on your tech journey.

Image by:

WOCinTech Chat. Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 4.0

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