Building BLT HackerHouse: An Open Source Journey!

rp_dex — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:35:08 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to intern with OWASP BLT, where I've been working on BLT HackerHouse a real time platform that visualizes contributor activity in an interactive virtual house.

The idea behind HackerHouse is simple: as contributors open merge requests, report bugs, or interact with the project, their avatars move through different rooms, giving maintainers a live overview of what's happening across the community. Behind that visualization is a backend responsible for processing events, managing contributor state, and delivering updates in real time.

When I joined, I expected my biggest challenge to be designing the backend architecture. Instead, the project took an unexpected turn.

During development, the OWASP BLT GitHub organization became inaccessible, requiring the team to migrate active development to GitLab. It wasn't just a matter of moving repositories documentation, development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and contributor onboarding all had to be updated while development continued.

It was the first time I'd experienced how quickly the direction of an open source project can change and how important adaptability is. Watching the community reorganize and keep shipping despite the disruption was a valuable lesson in resilience.

Alongside the migration, I focused on building the backend foundation for HackerHouse. This included designing an event processing pipeline, implementing webhook handling, creating a unified event model, building real-time communication with WebSockets, and writing automated tests to ensure the system remained reliable as it evolved.

One of my biggest takeaways from this internship has been that building software isn't just about implementing features. It's about designing systems that can evolve, collaborating with an open source community, and adapting when unexpected challenges arise.

I'm excited to continue developing HackerHouse over the coming weeks and contribute further to the OWASP BLT ecosystem. This experience has already taught me far more than I expected not just about backend engineering, but about how resilient and collaborative open source communities can be.

Next Week Is Going to Be Pure Chaos!!

rp_dex — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:40:41 +0000

Next week my life will become a distributed system under heavy load.

Why??

Because three things are happening at the same time:

College midsems starts Monday

GSOC proposal writing

Trying to push open source PRs before deadlines

Which means my schedule next week looks something like this:

9:00 AM -> Study for midsem
11:00 AM -> Panic
12:00 PM -> Debug failing PR
2:00 PM -> Realize I studied the wrong subject
4:00 PM -> Write proposal draft
6:00 PM -> Coffee
7:00 PM -> Another PR review request appears
9:00 PM -> Existential crisis
2:00 AM -> Finally understand the code
2:05 AM -> Maintainer asks for rebase

The Academic vs Open Source Conflict

Professors expect to focus on my exams..
Maintainers expect “Can you update the PR with the latest changes?”
My brain expects Sleep

None of these expectations are being met.

The Midsem Preparation Strategy

Open the syllabus.
Realise I should've started earlier.
Open GitHub instead.
Convince myself fixing a bug is “productive studying”..

Proposal Writing Mode

Writing proposals is a special experience.

You start confident

“This project idea is brilliant.”

Two hours later

“Do I even understand my own architecture?”

Four hours later

“Maybe I should become a farmer.”

Reality of the Week

By Thursday the system will degrade into:

caffeine driven coding

last minute studying

refreshing GitHub notifications

pretending everything is under control

Spoiler: it will not be under control.

Final Thoughts

Next week is either going to be:

extremely productive

an absolute disaster

But either way…