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.
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