Alexander-Schranz
Alexander Schranz
Core Developer – Sulu GmbH
Core developer and support king. So dedicated to his work that we couldn't find a hobby to mention.
@alex_s_

The 1st EU-FOSSA Symfony Hackathon

In April 2019, 59 of the most active Symfony contributors, myself included, met at the 1st EU-FOSSA Hackathon. We worked on open issues, pull requests and also on new features for the Symfony framework which Sulu is based on. The Hackathon is part of the FOSSA 2 program of the EU-Commission which focuses on supporting some of the most used open source projects in the EU region.

The Venue

The hackathon took place at Silversquare TRIOMPHE Co-Working space in Ixelles, one of the nineteen municipalities of the Brussels-Capital region. The location was very colorful and had many places to rest, just take a look at this video:

The team of BeMyApp, a company specialised in organizing hackathons, took care of every developer's well-being and served us with great food and drinks.

More Photos of the hackathon can be found in the offical Flickr album here.

What we did work on?

There was a strong focus on the security component and how it could be improved. Also, I want to mention here that the EU Commission has a Bug Bounty Program running for Symfony which range from 350,- EUR to 15.000,- EUR! You can read more information about that on here.

Most of us were looking at existing issues and open pull request, verify them and trying to close or finish them. And not only programming issues where resolved, there was also work done on the Symfony Diversity Initiative or fixing issues with the venue:

Personally, I worked on the PhpUnit 8 compatibility in Symfony PhpUnit Bridge. I finally  was able to find a fix to ensure support for all features Symfony provides, even for PhpUnit 8. 

Another open pull request I had a look at was the Redis Transport for the new Symfony messenger component from Antoine Bluchet. I was very motivated to work on this one and bring the Redis transport into the Symfony core after we created our own Redis Transport Bundle some months ago.

The Result

The result of the hackathon was amazing, about 80 issues were closed and more than 90 pull requests merged in less than 48 hours.

The complete result of the Hackathon can be found on the offical EU-Fossa Symfony Hackathon 2019 page.

It has been great to be part of this very helpful and highly motivated community and it was a great pleasure to work with everyone to keep Symfony being one of the greatest PHP frameworks. I would like to thank the BeMyApp team, the Symfony core team, all attendees who supported each other (in my case specially Tobias Nyholm and Samuel Roze, who helped me in implementing the Redis Messenger Transport), the whole EU FOSSA team and specially the EU-Commission for supporting open source software!

I want to finish this blog post with the words of Mario Campolargo, Deputy Director-General of @EU_DIGITS:

"You are the prove that, when people come together innovation happens!"