2078 lines of code across 24 PRs were changed in Wasp repo during HacktoberFest 2022 - the most prominent online event for promoting and celebrating OSS culture. October has been a blast, to say the least, and the most active month in the repo's history.

This is the story of our journey along with the tips on leveraging Hacktoberfest to get your repo buzzing! 🐝🐝

We are working on a new web framework that integrates with React & Node.js, and also happens to be a language. As you can probably imagine, it’s not easy to get people to use a new piece of technology, especially while still in Alpha. On the other hand, without users and their feedback, it’s impossible to know what to build.

That is why we ran Alpha Testing Program for Wasp - here is what we learned and what went both well and wrong along the way.

Julian LaNeve is an engineer and data scientist who currently works at Astronomer.io as a Product Manager. In his free time, he enjoys playing poker, chess and winning data science competitions.

His project, Farnance, is a SaaS marketplace that allows farmers to transform their production into a digital asset on blockchain. Julian and his team developed Farnance as a part of the London Business School’s annual hackathon HackLBS 2021, and ended up as winners among more than 250 participants competing for 6 prizes in total!

Read on to learn why Julian chose Wasp to develop and deploy Farnance and what parts he enjoyed the most.

Wasp is an open-source configuration language for building full-stack web apps that integrates with React & Node.js. We launched first prototype 2 years ago, currently are at 1.9k stars on GitHub and will be releasing Beta in the coming months.

It was very hard for us to find and be able to learn from early inception stories of successful OSS projects and that's why we want to share what it looked like for Wasp.

We’ll build a web app to solve every developer's most common problem – finding an excuse to justify our messy work! And will do it with a single config file that covers the full-stack app architecture plus several dozen lines of code. In the quickest possible way, so we can’t excuse ourselves from building it!

Best excuse of all time! Taken from here.

Haskell is a unique and beautiful language that is worth learning, if for nothing else, then just for the concepts it introduces and their potential to expand your view on programming.

I have been programming in Haskell on and off since 2011 and professionally for the past 2 years, building a compiler. While in that time Haskell has become much more beginner-friendly, I keep seeing beginners who are overwhelmed by numerous popular options for build tools, installers, introductory educational resources, and similar. Haskell’s homepage getting a call from the previous decade to give them their UX back :D also doesn’t help!

That is why I decided to write this opinionated and practical post that will tell you exactly how to get started with Haskell in 2022 in the most standard / common way. Instead of worrying about decisions that you are not equipped to make at the moment (e.g. “what is the best build tool?”), you can focus on enjoying learning Haskell :)!

I have been programming professionally for over a decade, using a variety of languages day-to-day including Ada, C, Java, Ruby, Elixir, and JavaScript. I’ve also tried some obscure ones, albeit less frequently and for different purposes: MIPS assembly language and OCaml for academic work (I’m a BS, MS, and PhD dropout in CS), and Zig for some side projects. In short, I like learning new languages (at least at a surface level) and have been exposed to different programming paradigms, including functional.

Yet, I have never done Haskell. I’ve wanted to learn it since my college days, but never got the time. In late 2021, though, my curiosity took over. I wanted to see for myself if the mystique and the Kool-Aid hype (or hate) around it are justified. :P So, I decided I’d start learning it on the side and also look for a company that uses it as my next gig. That’s how my Haskell journey started, and how I got into Wasp a few months later.

Except for a handful of companies who send people to Mars or develop AGI, most startups don’t seem to offer a good reason to join them. You go to their websites and all you see is vague, baseless, overly generic mission-schmission/values-schvalues HR nonsense that supposedly should turn you into a raving fan of whatever they’re doing and make you hit that “Join” button until their servers crash. Well…

Some people think that’s because most startups aren’t worth joining. I disagree. This argument generalizes one’s own reasons for joining a startup onto every other human being out there, which is unlikely to be true. I think most startups, no matter how ordinary, do have a reason to join them; a good reason; even many good reasons — they just fail to communicate them well. They’re like a shy nerd on Tinder with an empty bio and no profile pic: a kind, intelligent, and thoughtful human being who, unfortunately, will be ruthlessly swiped left — not because he’s a bad match but because his profile doesn’t show why he’s a good one.

Visually, this “Tinder profile problem” looks like this: