First WireMock Hack Day in London - How did it go

On October 11th, WireMock Inc together with the London Java Community organised a hack day in our new office in London. This event was held as a part of Hacktoberfest - a global open source event. In 2023 WireMock participates in Hacktoberfest, and we are happy to do our first ever community hack day as a part of it

We got 16 participants and worked together on a few projects like YAML configuration support in WireMock, OpenTelemetry integrations, improving documentation and Kotlin DSL, and more. We would like to thank all participants for their participation, contributions and many interesting discussions during the event!

What were we working on?

Most of the participants organised into groups in order to collaborate on specific ideas.

• David Hamilton led a group who worked on modernising and improving the Kotlin WireMock SDK. Group included Yerson Fabian Lasso Bautista and Akhil Kaparthi.
• Boris Morris and Andrew Khoo implemented OpenTelemetry tracing via a new WireMock extension
• Karanja Mutahi and Prakhar Sharma worked on adding YAML stub mapping support (PR #2436)
• Dave Cheng worked on writing a Wikipedia article about WireMock (see Draft:WireMock)
• Lee Turner started working on an improved body abstraction in WireMock for better metadata and compression support
• Tom Akehurst created a few patches for WireMock and its new extension for gRPC
• Oleg Nenashev, while supporting the team remotely from Switzerland, was also hacking the first prototype of the WireMock Extensions Listing 
• Rob Elliot, Mark Gerrard and Antonio Perez Dieppa were helping other participants and hacking some prototypes
• A few other folks were exploring WireMock in their projects. Hopefully we will see more adoptions soon :) 

At the end of the event, the teams presented their projects to each other, and then went to the afterparty together. We didn’t record the demos to maintain informal and free conversations at the event, but we hope to record and publish demos at the end of Hacktoberfest.

Over the next weeks, we will be working together with Hacktoberfest contributors on landing their changes and on making the new features available to WireMock users. We hope that this month will be just the beginning of the open source journey for many contributors, and we invite everyone to participate in open source, the London Java Community and other local Java User Groups and of course in WireMock itself. Check out this guide if you’re interested in participating!

It is not too late to join Hacktoberfest!

Hacktoberfest will continue for the whole October and you can join at any moment, regardless of your location, expertise and available time. All contributors will receive special digital awards, and we are also happy to offer T-shirts and special swag to the most active contributors to the WireMock open source ecosystem!

You can help make WireMock a better tool and community in a number of ways, Basically, anything -as-code counts if submitted via a pull request: contribute new features, bug fixes or enhancements; adopt WireMock in your projects; write or improve documentation; publish new mock API templates; create new demos; improve WireMock user and developer experience, create cool artwork, and anything else. 

See this blog post to get started and join the event. We will be also organizing a few online events to present demos, discuss contributing to WireMock, or talk about adoption experiences. There will also be office hours for those who are interested. Follow WireMock on social media to not miss the announcements.