Meet the Maintainers | 31 Days, 31 FOSS Maintainers from India

[ashlesh]

Trying to schedule a meeting with five people shouldn’t feel like assembling the Avengers.

Meet Samay, built by Anand Baburajan It is a clean, open-source Doodle alternative that doesn’t ask you to log in, upgrade, or “invite collaborators” just to pick a Tuesday.

It’s FOSS, dead simple, and doesn’t need 14 emails and a sacrificial goat to find a common time slot.

For Day 21 of #MeetTheMaintainers, say hello to Anand, the guy who looked at Doodle and said, “We have Samay at home. And it’s better.” Anand also maintains Wordamour and CQ2.

Q: A small brief about your project

Samay - Group scheduling tool

Q: How can someone support your project?

Use it to find a common time for a group meeting and buy me a coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/anandbaburajan) if you found it useful

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Impact and rewards often show up in quiet, unexpected ways.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I find it joyful when people use my projects, and they do.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Daft Punk - Get Lucky

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

[ashlesh]

Day 22 of #MeetTheMaintainers

Meet OCaml and KC Sivaramakrishnan

OCaml is what happens when a language decides to be fast, smart, and drama-free. It’s functional, strongly typed, and powers literally everything without breaking a sweat.

Say hello to KC Sivaramakrishnan, one of the maintainers keeping things safe, speedy, and suspiciously bug-free since the ’90s.

Q: A small brief about your project

OCaml is a powerful, expressive, and statically typed functional programming language that combines functional, imperative, and object-oriented paradigms. It features a sophisticated type system with type inference, making code both concise and safe, and its performance rivals that of C in many cases, thanks to its native code compiler. OCaml is particularly strong in areas like language tooling, formal verification, and systems programming, with robust support for abstraction and modularity. It powers industrial-scale software at companies like Jane Street and is the foundation of projects like the Coq proof assistant, the Tezos blockchain, and the MirageOS unikernel framework. For developers seeking reliability, maintainability, and strong compile-time guarantees, OCaml offers a mature ecosystem and a pragmatic functional programming experience.

Q: How can someone support your project?

Please contribute to the compiler [1] and the wider ecosystem [2,3,4]

[1] ocaml/CONTRIBUTING.md at trunk · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub
[2] ocaml.org/CONTRIBUTING.md at main · ocaml/ocaml.org · GitHub
[3] Call for Volunteers to Help Maintain the Opam-Repository - Community - OCaml
[4] opam-repository/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · ocaml/opam-repository · GitHub

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

When I started, I thought being a good maintainer meant writing clever code and fixing bugs quickly. Sure, that was necessary. But over time, I learned that the real work is communication, empathy, mentorship, setting boundaries, and building a community that can sustain the project without burning anyone out. The code is the easy part—people are the challenge and the reward.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I do it because it’s one of the rare ways in software where ideas, craft, and community come together meaningfully. Open-source gave me a platform early in my career, and maintaining projects now feels like returning the favour — making room for others, especially those exploring programming languages or systems work from unconventional paths. What keeps me going is when someone says, “I learned something because of this,” or when a small improvement sparks a bigger contribution elsewhere.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

“My Shot” from Hamilton.

Feels like OCaml’s anthem—it’s not just Hamilton’s big moment, but also his crew stepping up, full of ideas and fire. Like that group of bold thinkers, the OCaml community is full of people who care about building well, thinking clearly, and making their shot count. It’s not the loudest language out there, but it’s for folks who want to do something meaningful with code, together.

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

You plant, you nurture, others grow with it.

[ashlesh]

Day 23 of #MeetTheMaintainers, we bring you Frappe Learning and Jannat Patel

Teaching online shouldn’t require selling your data or your soul.

Frappe Learning is an open-source learning platform that gives you all the good bits, courses, quizzes, videos, live classes , minus the platform fees, mysterious restrictions, or surprise UI updates that somehow make everything worse.

Whether you’re training five people or five thousand, it scales without throwing a tantrum.

Say hello to Jannat, one of the maintainers that is putting educators back in control , no edtech overlords required.

Q: A small brief about your project

Frappe Learning is a learning management system that helps you create structured courses. Your lessons can have text content, videos, and embeds. You can also create and add quizzes and assignments of various forms. The major differentiator from other LMSs is that we have tried to keep it simple and not bloated like other alternatives (Moodle). Also, we don’t enforce learning. Where other platforms allow instructors to add restrictions on how a student can move within the course, Frappe Learning has no such feature because we believe that learning can never be enforced.

Q: How can someone support your project?

I would appreciate more contributions

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

I would probably tell my younger self that patience and consistency are everything, and also to cultivate the habit of documenting regularly.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

Working on this app feels very fulfilling. It feels like my way of contributing to society.

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

- Exhausted but very happy and at peace on the inside

[ashlesh]

Day 24 of #MeetTheMaintainers

Meet Ravi Dwivedi and Prav

You shouldn’t need a phone number, a cloud account, and a secret deal with Silicon Valley just to say “hi”.

Prav lets you message securely, without giving up your birth certificate. Built on XMPP, it’s free, open-source, and doesn’t pretend to be your friend just to harvest your metadata.

Say hello Ravi, one of the maintainers proving you don’t need to sell out to stay connected.

Q: A small brief about your project

Prav is a messaging service which can be used to exchange messages, audio/video calls, files, images and videos over the Internet. Inspired by the Quicksy app, Prav provides the convenience of registering with a phone number. It is federated with other XMPP providers, while at the same time easy to use.

Q: How can someone support your project?

By installing Prav app (check https://prav.app), sending donations https://prav.app/donate , volunteering (Get involved - Prav) or by becoming a member of the cooperative Become a Member - Prav

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Help run community-run services instead of self-hosting a lot of services on your own.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I think Prav project is doing what no other project is doing - mass adoption of a federated XMPP service with convenient onboarding process. I also feel ownership and responsibility towards the project. Mass adoption of messaging services is important because messaging services are based on network effects. Otherwise, I would myself need to use proprietary services for chatting.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Frolic by Luciano Michelini

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

(Pigeon)

[ashlesh]

Postman called. It’s feeling bloated. Day 25 of #MeetTheMaintainers

Say hello to Hoppscotch, and Liyas Thomas.

Hoppscotch is the sleek, open-source API client that works in your browser and doesn’t spy on you. No fluff. Just fetch.

Meet Liyas, one of the maintainers who made APIs less “ugh” and more “aha.”

Q: A small brief about your project

Hoppscotch is a free and open-source API development platform designed for building, testing, and documenting APIs. It’s a web-based alternative to tools like Postman, Insomnia, and Paw, offering a user-friendly interface for sending requests and viewing responses. Hoppscotch emphasizes ease of use and accessibility, making it a suitable choice for developers of all skill levels.

Q: How can someone support your project?

GitHub Sponsors: Sponsor @hoppscotch on GitHub Sponsors · GitHub

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Don’t try to do everything yourself. In the early days of Hoppscotch, I took on way too much, code, issues, PRs, design, community, documentation, all solo. It felt like my baby, and I was scared to let go of control. But open source thrives when you trust the community. Delegate. Document things clearly. Welcome contributors early and often. Your project will grow faster, stronger, and you won’t burn out doing it alone.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

Because Hoppscotch started as something I needed, and it turns out thousands of others needed it too. When I built the first version, it was a simple idea: a lightweight, fast, browser-based alternative to API clients like Postman. I open-sourced it just to share it. Then the community showed up — not just with stars and likes, but with real contributions, feedback, and passion. That’s incredibly motivating. Knowing that thousands of developers use Hoppscotch every day to build better software is wild. That’s fuel.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

‘Avengers assemble’ theme is the energy I’d assign to the Hoppscotch GitHub repo during a big release or a major refactor sprint.

Q: Which file in your project would you most like to set on fire?

hoppscotch/packages/hoppscotch-common/src/modules/i18n.ts at main · hoppscotch/hoppscotch · GitHub

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

[Ruchika]

Day 26 of hashtag#MeetTheMaintainers

Spreadsheets are great… until they try to be databases.
Databases are great… until you need to be a developer to use them.

Enter Mathesar — a friendly, open-source layer over PostgreSQL that lets anyone view, query, edit, and collaborate on data without writing code.
Built for users of all skill levels, it’s spreadsheet-simple but database-powerful.

Say hi to Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal, one of the minds behind this magic.
Maintaining data sanity, one open table at a time.

Q: A small brief about your project

Mathesar is a web application that makes working with PostgreSQL databases both simple and powerful. It empowers users of all technical skill levels to view, edit, query, and collaborate on data with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface—no code needed. It’s self hosted, can be deployed in minutes, and works directly with PostgreSQL databases, schemas, and tables without extra abstractions. The project is 100% open source, GPLv3 licensed, and maintained by Mathesar Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Q: How can someone support your project?

You don’t have to drop everything the moment someone asks for a new feature or bug fix, you can do it at your own pace and follow your own roadmap. People who value your FOSS will step up and contribute, or they’ll wait for it.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

In my opinion, building software is an art, just like sketching or dancing. The sheer joy of sitting in your room as a teenager, building something just for fun, for yourself, and showing it to your friends, is a feeling I’d never forget. The reason I was able to get into building software, so easily, by myself, is entirely because of FOSS and the culture around it. This eventually lead to my career in software engineering. It always fascinated me that people just built something and gave it to everyone, for free. I understand why. Just like a musicians playing in subway stations, artists drawing on deserted walls, we build software for everyone. Maintaining a FOSS project is my way of giving back to everything the community has given me. The joy you feel when a random person around the world gets excited about something you built, is still surreal. I’m grateful for the fact that I’m able to do this full-time.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

The “Moongil Kaadugale” tamil song, from early 2000s. The lyrics reflect the way I feel about Mathesar, from the freedom seeking sentiment that compares to Mathesar’s open source nature, to the imagery given of a moongil (bamboo) which is resilient and evokes a growth sentiment that compares to Mathesar’s aim to give non-technical people tools to adapt to the data-driven world.

Q: What’s your open-source villain origin story?

Users expecting commercial level support & treatment. We give you what we build for free, if you need something, contribute, don’t demand.

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

Just a regular person. Most maintainers thanklessly maintain FOSS from their basement, for fun, which supports massive infrastructure in the real-world (like that xkcd comic).

[ashlesh]

Day 27 of #MeetTheMaintainers
Say hello to Pyodide and Agriya Khetarpal.

Pyodide runs real Python, not watered down, not rewritten, in the browser, with support for scientific libraries and everything. Started at Mozilla, now community-led, Pyodide is what happens when Python goes serverless and still brings NumPy to the party.

Meet Agriya, one of the folks behind the madness that somehow… just works.

Q: A small brief about your project

Pyodide is an open-source, MPL-licensed Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly/Emscripten. It brings a port of CPython and the Scientific Python stack for web browsers, and provides a robust foreign function interface (FFI) between JavaScript and Python that allows data interchange between both languages.

It also comes with a standards-compliant build system for cross-compiling Python packages into WebAssembly wheels, and an array of more than 290 packages and system-level libraries, and an in-browser package manager, micropip, to install and use them in WebAssembly runtimes.

Q: How can someone support your project?

Contributions for code, docs, community examples, and design work are welcome!

Also, if you have the privilege to contribute financially, please consider donating to us on our OpenCollective page at https://opencollective.com/pyodide or via GitHub Sponsors at Sponsor @pyodide on GitHub Sponsors · GitHub

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

The reward of delayed gratification: sustainability matters much more than initial excitement; it is imperative to design contributing guidelines, your personal boundaries, and think about funding decisions from early days, as if your project will be successful up to a decade later – because if it does, you will be grateful for working on those structures early on.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

Maintaining open-source software gives me a chance to contribute to something bigger than myself. I get to create a difference to digital heritage that future programmers can study, learn from, and build upon. The collaborative aspect also keeps me engaged, as I get to interact with people all over the world whom I would never meet or have met otherwise!

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Transylvania by Iron Maiden

Q: Which file in your project would you most like to set on fire?

The EIGHTEEN patches we currently use to compile SciPy to WebAssembly

Q: What’s your open-source villain origin story?

I realised I’ve become a villain ever since the day I’ve had more power closing issues with the “won’t fix” label than any comic book crook will ever have!

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

[ashlesh]

Day 28 of #MeetTheMaintainers

We bring you, Appium Device Farm and Srinivasan Sekar

Appium Device Farm makes it easy to connect real Android and iOS devices, run parallel tests, and debug remotely, all without the USB cable jungle.

Meet Srinivasan Sekar, one of the maintainers turning mobile testing from mess to manageable. Srinivasan also helps maintain, MCP Appium Gestures, and MCP for WebDriverAgent.

Q: A small brief about your project

Appium Device-farm is a powerful plugin designed specifically to manage and streamline the creation of driver sessions for connected devices, including Android and iOS real devices, emulators, and simulators. This plugin extends the capabilities of Appium, making it easier for developers and testers to automate testing processes across a wide range of device types, ensuring that applications function smoothly in diverse environments.

Q: How can someone support your project?

Welcome any potential first-time contributors who are curious, love open source, and have a passion to contribute to the community. Other means of contributions are also welcome through our GitHub sponsors (Sponsor @AppiumTestDistribution on GitHub Sponsors · GitHub) and via open-collective (https://opencollective.com/appium-device-farm).

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Document everything not for others, but for your future self, who will have absolutely no memory of why that clever hack in line 42 exists.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

The satisfaction of building something that others find useful. Also, nothing beats the thrill of a stranger fixing a bug you’ve been stuck on for weeks with a simple solution you never considered.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Fix You’ by Coldplay. We spend our entire day doing that.

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

- Every contribution is a piece of the puzzle, and somehow they all fit together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

[ashlesh]

Day 29 of #MeetTheMaintainers
Meet Mecha, and Shoaib Merchant.

You know that fantasy where your computer is actually your computer?
Modular, hackable, runs Linux, and doesn’t send your keystrokes to five different clouds?

That’s not a pipe dream, that’s Mecha, with its open ecosystem hardware and FOSS software for building pocket-sized machines that are actually yours.

Designed by the team at Mecha, The Mecha Comet their first hardware has swappable magnetic modules, and zero interest in vendor lock-in. You can 3D-print your own parts, write your own shell, or just run your scripts in peace.

Say hello to Shoaib, one of the folks behind Mecha, building computing that’s open, programmable, and kinda cute too.

Q: A small brief about your project

At Mecha we are redefining computer hardware. Our first computer the Mecha Comet (mecha.so/comet) is a portable handheld Linux Computer built to be a swiss army knife for all portable computing needs. It has applications across enthusiasts, education, commercial and industrial use. The Comet runs on entirely FOSS and all of it is made available on our GitHub (Mecha · GitHub)

Q: How can someone support your project?

We are looking for pilot users who can contribute to our software and hardware platform across different areas such as building open hardware extensions, kernel development, low-level GUI development and cloud services. Everyone is welcome! Just let us know what interests you the most at mecha.so/pilot and we will reach out.

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Don’t be afraid of being judged, better to do it bad than not do it at all.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I truly believe that FOSS helps push the boundaries of human civilization further in ways that you can never imagine. The amount of impact of what you end up building has no limit.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

X Ambassadors - Renegades

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

[ashlesh]

Day 30th of #MeetTheMaintainers

Say hello to Scrite and Prashanth N Udupa

Scrite is the screenwriting app that gets storytelling, timelines, scene graphs, characters losing plot, all of it.It’s open-source, made in Bengaluru, and lets you write in Indian languages without crying over formatting.

Meet Prashanth, one of the folks helping you turn “Final Draft” into “finally done.”

Q: A small brief about your project

Scrite is a screenwriting software designed for Indian languages, enabling writers to create professionally formatted scripts, visually structure stories, refine narratives with ease, and generate detailed pre-production reports.

Q: How can someone support your project?

Spread the word—invite filmmakers to try the app, share video reviews, contribute guides or code, and join our Discord to help new users.

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

You don’t have to respond to everything immediately. Breathe. Relax. Take your time.

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I love watching films, and it’s exciting to know that many of them are now being written using Scrite.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Not sure if this can be a theme song, but this is one song that got me through a lot of coding in Scrite. I have no idea why. Its my go-to song to unlock the mood to build long and elaborate stuff in the app: YouTube Music

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

[ashlesh]

Day 31 of #MeetTheMaintainers!

Meet ScanCode and Ayan Sinha Mahapatra

Your codebase is a mystery box of borrowed bits, and at some point, someone’s going to ask, “Hey, are we allowed to use this?”

ScanCode scans your project to uncover licenses, origins, and dependencies.
No guesswork. No legal roulette. Just clean, documented code.

Meet Ayan, one of the folks helping open source stay open and above board.

Q: A small brief about your project

A typical software project often reuses hundreds of third-party packages. License, packages, dependencies and origin information is not always easy to find and not normalized: ScanCode discovers and normalizes this data for you. You can scan containers, binaries, source archives, code snippets/files or any code repository, or their dependencies, and look for software licensing issues, vulnerabilities, community health metrics, origin, other similar/matching FOSS code, and this is available as a CLI tool, python library, as a webapp with docker/k8s or as a GitHub action. Along with our FOSS projects to scan code, we also release open data to use with the tools and provide instances of these tools/APIs for public use.

Q: How can someone support your project?

Use our tool to scan your projects/dependencies, contribute with development, docs, issues and use cases, or help us sustain ourselves: Sponsor @aboutcode-org on GitHub Sponsors · GitHub

Q: One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Being extra kind to all other contributors (and yourself) goes a long way, and don’t be afraid to say no or set clear expectations. And then docs, docs, docs!

Q: Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project? What keeps you going?

I’ve had the privilege of having an excellent mentor and very nice folks as co-maintainers so it is really nice to build something with them. And also lots of strangers online using our tools, helping us and letting us know that we’re building something useful is the best part.

Q: If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

I’m not sure about a theme song, but a song which is the farthest from being our theme song would be: All iz well (in your code) from 3 Idiots

Q: Which file in your project would you most like to set on fire?

scancode-toolkit/.github/workflows/scancode-release.yml at develop · aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit · GitHub
It’s usually always on fire anyways, with the many supported OSs, and python versions we test for, releasing as a container, CLI tool, python/OS libraries, with many non-pure-python dependencies (most of which we maintain) which needs wheels released for every combination of OS/python versions and our third party package repository (it’s a small pypi index that we maintain, vetting each new package added here) used to build release archives, things are quite complicated on this release file.

Q: If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?