Hacktoberfest: So long and thanks for all the Pull Requests
This article was co-authored by Charlie Lewis.
We are happy to announce that Hacktoberfest 2017 was a great success on many fronts. We started out the month inviting participation on our Poseidon and Vent projects and are excited to report that we got a great response. To recap:
Poseidon is a python-based application that leverages software defined networks (SDN) to acquire and then feed network traffic to a number of machine learning techniques. The machine learning algorithms classify and predict both the type of device and whether the device is acting normally or abnormally.
Vent is a light-weight platform built to automate network collection and analysis pipelines using a flexible set of popular open source tools and technologies. Vent is python-based, extensible, leverages Docker containers, and provides both an API and CLI.
Code coverage for Poseidon indicates that the number of lines of code that were tested increased from 50% to nearly 100% during Hacktoberfest! Check out the chart below (x-axis represents days):
In this post we will go over some stats and figures that highlight just how important Hacktoberfest contributions were to projects inside and outside of our lab.
What did we set out to accomplish?
We defined 3 specific areas of work that needed to be addressed on our projects. We list them below:
- Build a plugin for vent that takes network traffic and builds a visual graph (Details here)
- Build a plugin for vent that takes .exe files and automatically does things like virus scanning and MD5 checksums (Details here)
- Interact with physical SDN switches and Raspberry Pi devices using open source SDN controllers such as Ryu or FAUCET to work as an alternative SDN controller on Poseidon (Work is still on-going)
We plan to take a deeper dive in a future blog post about the third item above, so keep an eye out.
How did it go?
Hacktoberfest brought out the best in people. Participants flocked from all over. We had 12 participants contribute to GitHub from our own organization. Collectively we managed to:
- Make 557 commits
- Open 201 pull requests in 85 different projects
- Create 69 issues
We also managed to get a total of 33 new contributors on our repositories from at least 5 different countries. Here they are:
For the last 31 days, here’s what our three main project’s activity looked like:
That’s all folks!
This was the second year we participated in Hacktoberfest and all in all, we had a great experience. We absolutely look forward to getting involved again next year! But you don’t have to wait to contribute, there is always plenty of work to do!
Happy hacking.
