Open source companies are amazing places to work for engineers. Your work is showcased to the world through private open source companies like GitLab and HashiCorp (makers of Terraform and Vault), and through public ones like Elastic, GitHub, and RedHat—all of which have enormous impact.

A lot will happen over the next 1,000 years, and the codebase for the Mattermost open source project will be along for the entire ride. On July 8, GitHub successfully deposited 21 terabytes of open source repository data in the Arctic World Archive, a (very) long-term storage facility located on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway near the North Pole.

Today marks five years since the start of the Mattermost open source project! We reflected on this exciting journey and reminisced about our missteps along the way. We’ve had many laughs and wanted to share them with our community.

This year, I got a unique opportunity to call in at Mattercon 2020 and give a talk about my experience working on Mattermost and open source software (OSS) in general. I talked about how OSS helped me grow as a self-taught developer and how working on issues from Mattermost’s repos helped me gain experience and confidence in software development. In this article, I will highlight some of the things I talked about and also throw in a few pointers related to working on OSS.

More than 2,000 developers from around the world participated in our open source bot hackfest, which we hosted on HackerEarth from January 10 through March 2. The goal of the event was to work with our community to create open source chatbots that integrate with Mattermost to accelerate DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, and we received many amazing submissions! We gave away $10,000 in prizes, including $6,000 cash to our top contributors.

We are thrilled to be a finalist for 'best open-source project' at DINAcon 2019. Wire is leading the way in bringing secure enterprise collaboration to organizations all around the world and being open-source is a crucial component in achieving our mission to protect organizations' digital assets.

We're excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 1.9, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes. Especially relevant for users migrating from the recently discontinued HipChat is our new HipChat data import tool.