Akash Hamirwasia

My learnings from building Blaze as a FOSS project

India FOSS 2.0India FOSS 2.0
BangaloreOpen slides

India FOSS 2.0 was organized by FOSS United and this was my first major offline conference talk. In this talk, I’ll be sharing my learnings from building Blaze as a FOSS project for the past 3 years. I started building Blaze out of frustration because I just couldn’t find a fast-and-easy file-sharing app that worked on all devices without requiring native apps.

Blaze was always a free and open-source project from the start, something I had not planned for. It was yet another side-project of mine that I wanted to share with the rest of the world and improve how people shared files with each other. It started out simple and has over the years evolved into a more polished product with the focus still being on simplicity and file-sharing.

As a sole maintainer of Blaze, I learned a lot about these key topics while building projects in FOSS that I shared in this talk:

  • A contributor’s mindset towards open source projects.

  • Challenges of maintaining a FOSS project alone.

  • Public awareness / Exposure of FOSS projects and how it can be improved.

  • Why open source may not be completely open, awareness about FOSS licenses.

  • Software is not just code and it’s hard to open-source everything.

  • Importance of sponsorships and donations.

    Huge shoutout to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Blaze! DO check out their services if you are looking for a developer-friendly cloud platform.

Overall, it was a great experience speaking and attending India FOSS 2.0. It’s so nice to see that we have dedicated conferences and meetups discussing about FOSS, along with some very high-quality FOSS projects out of India, which was quite unheard of a few years back. I had an amazing time meeting people offline(after 2 long years of COVID-19) and learning about the FOSS ecosystem. Looking forward to more conferences!

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