CyberReboot Kicks Off Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest — which takes place throughout the month of October — has become an exciting time of the year for open source software. For those unfamiliar, Hacktoberfest is a month long celebration of open source software sponsored by GitHub, Digital Ocean, and (now) Twilio (Twilio joined this year). For the last five years Hacktoberfest has raised awareness and lowered the barrier for participation and collaboration on open source projects. This is the third year the Cyber Reboot team is participating in Hacktoberfest.

Last year we were happy to report a very successful Hacktoberfest turnout where we contributed to 85 different projects and attracted 33 new contributors to our projects. This year we hope to continue that trend. While we have several projects we’d love to have you collaborate with us on (https://github.com/cyberreboot), we’d like to highlight two projects specifically for this event.

The first project, CRviz, is a browser-based visualization tool for visualizing assets on a network at scale. You can learn more about what the project is currently capable of in this three-part blog series, or simply try it out yourself on our demonstration site: https://cyberreboot.github.io/CRviz

If that piques your interest, feel free to peruse the issues and tackle one that looks interesting to you, or file a new issue with a great idea you have that we haven’t thought of yet.

The second project, Poseidon — which was also highlighted last year — has come a long way. Poseidon can now be easily installed on Ubuntu systems, and it can also be run and tested completely in open source software; it no longer requires a hardware switch (thanks to Faucet and Open vSwitch), making it accessible to everyone. Poseidon demonstrates our approach to making software defined networks (SDN) actionable using machine learning techniques to guide decisions. Poseidon has a counterpart repository specifically for the machine learning aspects of Poseidon called PoseidonML, which you can learn more about here.

There is plenty of work to be done to help improve visibility, insight, manageability, and security of computer networks. We’re excited to be doing our small part to help in this ambitious effort, and we encourage and welcome collaboration.

You can search across our entire organization for issues specifically for Hacktoberfest here that might interest you as well.

Happy Hacktoberfest and happy hacking.