Liyas Thomas // @hoppscotch/hoppscotch

OPENING QUOTE: It's all about finding the passion project for you. It's actually a quite tough task to find someone's passion, and being an artist and developer, it was like a war in-between me to find what's my true passion. So I have to address these steps, how to choose your passion and how to make a product or a project that really resonates with your passion and not just because someone asks you to do it, but because you want to do it. 

Brian: That’s Liyas Thomas, founder of Hoppscotch, an open source API request builder that has been growing exponentially since it started a little over two years ago, and this is The ReadME Podcast, a GitHub podcast that takes a peek behind the curtain at some of the most impactful open source projects and the developers who make them happen. I am bdougie aka Brian Douglas…

Neha: And I’m nerdneha aka Neha Batra

Brian: Every episode, Neha and I invite a maintainer or open source developer into our studio to explore the impact their work is making on the world around them. 

Neha: In this episode, we speak with Liyas, who is based in Kerala, India and has been garnering contributors and recognition for his open source project, Hoppscotch. An artist at heart, Liyas has always believed that beauty should be at the core of all that one does, whether it be programming or helping others. There’s an art to code and he has tapped into that, both through his work and also in building community around him. Hoppscotch has won a number of awards and continues to inspire both Liyas and its contributors. In this conversation, we spoke about the art of coding, the process of building community, and the path to finding one’s passion.

But first, as always, we asked Liyas about his earliest memories of using a computer. 

Liyas: Well, it's a really old PC that my parents bought actually for my sister for her academic purpose, but I was so privileged to have access to it. This actually happened in my secondary studies, so that's when I actually came up with web technologies and all, so that's my first experience with programming and everything related to programming.

Brian: At this point, how old were you?

Liyas: I would say, I was somewhere around 13, I guess.

Brian: Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's amazing and sorry, I'm going to ask the next question, which is how old are you now? Because, I'm trying to do the math, because my first interaction was way more naive in this sort of rudimentary way, just looking at Expedia and looking at really cool things about countries. I guess my question to you right now is like, how old are you now, what's the time distance?

Liyas: I'm actually 25 and I've been contributing to serious programming for the past five plus years only.

Brian: Okay.

Neha: That's actually so early on, your familiarity with computers. It looks like that initial curiosity took off immediately. Did you have other friends around who were similarly curious that you were exchanging information with or where was your connection?

Liyas: Actually, no. I mean, none of my friends are interested to the stuffs that I like, and especially with programming and all. I actually studied in a very basic college and basic education system. So most of my friends had many, many other different interests, but it's hard to find someone who has same interest as much as you love the programming. So, yeah. 

Neha: While Liyas may not have had many friends that were interested in programming, when he went to University, he started meeting peers who were. That was very exciting and it became the gateway to his work in open source. Interestingly, there is this other side to Liyas, his artistic one.

Liyas: I'm an artist. I'm a lefty, so being a lefty is one of the unique things that's actually—it’s not common in India to be a lefty. So, I thought I would be an artist. I love to draw and design and paint. But if you think about being an artist for your career, it's not a safe choice. I choose to do engineering only after one year sitting out of my home, learning all about the interesting textures and all. And, I keep on making projects which can be added to my portfolio, so that I can ensure a pretty good job after I graduate. Yeah, that's a very uncommon way to get into tech.

Neha: Do you remember your first open source contribution? You were saying that you learned more about the open source world when you went to college, right?

Liyas: Yes. Yeah, in my sophomore year, in my college, there was a system where students actually gave feedback to their teachers based on their performance. My college too had a system, but it was basically pen and paper at that point of the time. So me, along with a couple of my friends, we decided to digitalize that part. We really wanted students to be able to give feedback to their faculty in a very easy way. Me, along with a couple of my friends made an app and it basically allowed students to give feedbacks, star ratings to their teachers. And by the end of the day, they get this report, so that the higher officials can evaluate it and give comments from students to teachers anonymously. This particular project is actually my first ever open source contribution and this happened in 2015 when I actually joined my college. By the time I graduated, there were at least more than 10 colleges using the software that we made. Yeah, that was my first ever open source contribution.

Neha: I'm so curious. How did the professors receive that, the time they got that report card, like what was the reaction?

Liyas: We literally made it so anonymous, teachers can't basically track which students give what grade. The previous process with pen and paper was a tedious thing. We had at least 3,000 students studying in that college and it would take at least two or three weeks to sort out the grading part for faculties and once we introduced this system, it was so easy. They can get the feedbacks from the whole 3,000 students in a day. So it literally helped them to take more classes, but again, helped them to get much better quality feedbacks from the students. Again, it helped them to perform better as teachers. Yeah. They were literally shocked, because they might have never thought that we could pull that off. With the help of open source and communities, we were literally able to add a couple more features from other students studying in other colleges and we could battle test the platform with a lot of other students and colleges and universities, so it really helped. Yeah.

Brian: I find that’s a fascinating project too, as well, because I used something similar in the States called Rate My Professor and it also helped me through my college years to pick the right professors—make sure I'm getting the classes that I can learn from. And then also, you want to avoid the professors that give too many tests or they don't provide the best experience for people who maybe have a life outside of school.

Neha: I totally used that too. I used it to also help me figure out, like where do you get the most learning? Is it the TA sessions? Is it like the actual class? Is it the book? We had a lot of advice on those on ratemyprofessor.com around how you can get the most out of the class. If it's a required class and you have to take it, how are you going to get through it and make sure that you're using your time wisely? So that got me super through college, for sure.

Brian: The first time I met Liyas was prior to a live stream on Twitch. Later, we chatted through Open Sauce, which helps folks find open source projects to contribute to. Liyas spoke of his project called Hoppscotch and how it solves a really niche problem for people who want to interface with APIs. I wanted to know more.

Liyas: I'm actually one among the core contributors of the Hoppscotch and it literally started with a personal issue that I had in my first ever tech job. Just after my graduation I actually joined a very super early-stage startup at my locality. It was actually a very fine day, very usual day at my workplace and I was assigned to test a bunch of APIs and to glue them with the front-end part. That was my assigned task. There were literally 100 plus endpoints for me to test and integrate with the front-end and the process was so tedious. I literally went on a hunt to find if there exists any tools which will automate that process for me. But sadly, I couldn't find one that suits my use case.

On that very night itself, I decided to make an app which will allow me to test APIs directly from the browser window itself and it literally took me like three to four hours to make the first ever MVP of Hoppscotch. Yeah, it was a personal [00:15:00] tool that I built for myself. I open sourced it just like all my other projects and I actually went to sleep that day and I did a tweet about it. I also wrote a blog post about it on dev.to platform. The next day when I woke up, I literally woke up with these 100 plus notifications from GitHub and Twitter. I mean, it was like a overnight feedback from the developer community. There were many issues, there were many feature requests and a lot of people started actually using it in their workplace. By the end of that first couple of weeks, we literally had 1,000 plus users using the first ever MVP. Yeah, that's how it all started.

Neha: What was your first reaction when you woke up to see all of the responses, all of the issues that were being opened, what was your first reaction?

Liyas: I was so shocked, because Hoppscotch is not actually my first ever open source project. Whenever I see a workflow which testing is my use case, especially in developer tools, I try to make it an alternative which suits my use case and I usually open source every such tools. At that point of time, I had at least a dozen open source projects, but this somehow had the privilege to be shared by the engineers to their friends and all. So I was so shocked and happy to realize that there exists such a problem in the API development life cycle and I made a solution which has literal use cases. So, so thrilled and so pumped up to keep on contributing that.

Brian: Yeah. That's awesome. I first ran into Hoppscotch under a different name, which was Postwoman. So it changed names. I'm actually curious to hear of the story behind the name change.

Liyas: Yeah. We actually started the project as Postwoman. It was like a mock on a name with another project and on our first anniversary. So the project actually started in 2019 and on our first anniversary year, in 2020, we decided to rebrand the whole project to something unique, just because we wanted to make sure that the popularity or the feedback that we are getting is not because of the similarity in the name, but we have to make sure there is actual value proposition going around and we did that. I mean, the name Hoppscotch is actually coined from the community as well. We rebranded the project on our anniversary and we have seen more than three times more engagement after rebranding the product. So we literally made sure that the feedback, the popularity is not something that came with the similarity with the name. 

Neha: There are some interesting threads when looking at Liyas’ projects. One is his desire to create something that saves time, and the other is his commitment to making his projects look beautiful. 

Liyas: I really love making art as much as I love designing user interfaces. So even though it's a simple applications like a color picker or something very utility functions, I always try to make it as beautiful as I can and try to compete with myself to come up with a newer design or if it's a UI issue, I always experiment with a lot of stuffs—basically art is an experiment. So every piece of code and every piece of art that I write is something always experimenting with my understanding and I really believe there exists a correlation with being an artist and a programmer, because writing code is also something very artistic.

Neha: What does beauty look like for you in an engineering system or something that you create?

Liyas: I'm actually a very atheistic advocate of minimalism. I really love minimalism concepts and even if it's a UI, I don't like to clutter it with a lot of components. I am really a huge fan of minimalism. Being minimalist and being accessible is my way of beautiful UIs.

Neha: So I used to work with a desktop team for GitHub which is also an open source repository and that is also something that we have in common, that they have in common as a value. It's really interesting how when you try to get something that's as simple as possible, you also inevitably make it as accessible as possible. The simplest concepts are the ones that people can onboard onto easily and are almost intuitive to understand and learn and there's a really nice win-win there, no matter where you're coming from and what your intention is.

Liyas: Couldn’t agree more on that.

Brian: Honestly, so I'm a Hoppscotch user too, as well. I've leveraged it for quick examples to go show on a stream or a stage, and it's not an easy problem to solve, especially… like a lot of developer tools have weird dashboards and drop-downs. Now, I'm actually realizing how easy it was for me to drop in a webhook URL and see what the webhook sent back to me, or as an API endpoint. I definitely use some other tools where I just sort of took way more steps to figure out what's the sort of hello world. What's the sort of, “I have a URL, how do I get data back?” I think you actually did a really good approach to that, so congrats.

Liyas: Thank you. I mean, if you check out Hoppscotch, you can actually see, we don't have a landing page at all. I was so keen on, you know, we have to let the user use the application within the first five seconds and I intentionally removed the landing page, because most of our users are pretty much opinionated about the application and they might have at least some background on dealing with API. So we really want to make it as easy as possible to get started with. Obviously, we have a documentation site if the user wants to know more about it. Yeah, thank you for that.

Brian: Hoppscotch gained popularity quickly and fluidly. Liyas decided to make it his full time job, with the hopes of building a robust business around it. It’s remarkable for a project to have explosive growth. That said, there’s a general assumption that open source isn’t a viable way to make money. What was the light bulb for Liyas to make the jump six months ago into doing this full-time? 

Liyas: When I started working on Hoppscotch, and I started getting sponsorship from many amazing people, like the CEO of GitHub is sponsoring us, co-founders of Ionic are sponsoring us. I mean, it was like a bunch of people, like 10 to 12 of them, but they are very famous and amazing people in the tech industry. I literally had chats with them, asking for mentorship on what would be if I switch from my day job to work on Hoppscotch full-time, and if I have enough time to make a actual product out of it, and if it has a monetization plan, it would be a no brainer for me. Every mentor that I have consulted with, they give me a green signal on that and always the open source community, their feedback, it has been there with me. These two things motivated me to switch from my day job to work on Hoppscotch full-time.

Neha: I think this is also bringing up something that I think we don't talk about enough, which is that along the journey of any open source project and any individual who's working on it, there is behind them, like a fleet of mentors who help them chart that path that they want to do. What kind of help have you gotten from mentors, especially before at the point that you're ready to monetize it and in order to help you understand the open source world and get the most out of it?

Liyas: I used to ask very simple questions like, “If I get to 500,000 users in the next six months, do I even have a market, product-market fit, or can I make sure that users are making use of it?” These kind of silly questions again. But the conversations really had very in-depth questions as well like, “Will I be able to find contributors in a serious way that I can make sure the project will continue to exist at least for the next couple of months?” or if they have enough motivation to work on it without getting paid, maybe for first couple of months? I have to make sure that the communities has enough motivation to contribute to the project. For these experts, I always ask for my mentors who are pioneers in open source and they always give me really good hope and that resulted me to switch from my day job to work on Hoppscotch full-time.

Neha: You mentioned wanting to know how you could get your contributors to be people who are helping contribute continuously and like how you can create that environment. What do you think brings your contributors back and keeps them in that community and keeps it growing?

Liyas: Well, we actually did some... I mean, we intentionally did some things which cultivates this contribution very easily, like if someone wants to contribute to Hoppscotch, we made it really, really simple to make the first contribution as easy as possible. It can be as easy as translating the software to their own favorite language, or fixing some typos, or writing the documentation. We really made it very easy for anyone to make the first contribution. But again, there are some intentional things that we did out of which the most important one is, if someone wants to introduce a feature, we actually created groups of contributors from which, if someone would love to make the UI, they can do that and pass the same feature request to someone else who actually writes to write a test rather than design the UI. So they can contribute to the same feature request in what they are expert of.

So, at the end of the week, or after some period, they all contribute to the same particular feature and it really came out very beautifully and it managed to land on the production. We made it really simple for anyone to make the first contribution.

Brian: Because of the ease of contributing to Hoppscotch, contributors keep coming back, and the community is growing. As a maintainer, managing time can be really tough and Liyas continues to navigate this part of it.

Liyas: Time management is a very tricky part being an open source maintainer, because the entire contributors actually are from different time zones. Like I live in a time zone, my partner lives in another time zone and the communications are mostly asynchronous almost every time. We have public channels in this code and in telegram, so that whenever someone raises an issue, the first maintainer or contributor who actually saw that issue in the first place responds to it as soon as possible. So we don't have a waiting period of like six to eight hours for the core team to see that issue and give a response back to the community,

Our entire contributors basically live in different time zones and whenever someone sees an issue or a feature request raised in our GitHub page, we immediately respond to it. We welcome the user to use any of our public channels and interact with them there and take the conversation forward. So, living in multiple time zones really helped us respond to issues quicker and this is something I really recommend for all open source project maintainers to do it.

Neha: I think one of the beauties of being able to have open source support across multiple time zones, is the fact that you will go to sleep and you'll wake up and you might wake up to an entirely different world almost every day, right? What do you check up on when you wake up in the morning or when you're starting to work on Hoppscotch?

Liyas: I have automated most of the steps which are pretty important regarding the repository like if someone reports a bug or a critical issue with the repo, I get notifications in our slack channel, because we made to do that. So, that will be the first thing in my routines to check if there is any new bugs or any critical issues that are affecting the users. So Hoppscotch, we have more than 20,000 plus monthly recurring users at this point and if some critical issues are existing, I will be fixing that at first and checking up the other issues. It might be a feature request, or some doubts which user has asked on our public channels. I will spend time to fix that and we will start with the current cycles in our roadmap and it reaches production after a couple of weeks. That's the current routine.

Brian: I'd love to hear more about Hoppscotch, but I think we've talked a lot about the story around it. Are you able to get like, what's the elevator pitch for Hoppscotch and what sort of features are included in it?

Liyas: Hoppscotch at the moment really focuses on API testing platforms. It's an automated test, writing scripts and all, but eventually we will be touching almost every development life cycle of APIs. That actually begins when engineers literally start to think about making an API, it's design, it's architecture, it's scalability and all, but not just that. After designing, it comes to the development part, and then only it's the testing part. Eventually, as per our current roadmap, we will be having features that will make the entire API development life cycle easier for engineers. Yeah, we have exciting features that would contribute to the solution. Yeah, that's about it.

Brian: Excellent. I love that plan and I love the ecosystem you are trying to improve. The API testing is not an easy problem and I love that you're all going to make it easier.

Neha: As part of that, so you've gotten to where you are now. What's next? What's the next problem that you're interested in solving with Hoppscotch?

Liyas: We really focus on the second phase of Hoppscotch in two areas. One is, Hoppscotch for enterprise organizations. It used to be a tool for individual uses or small scale startups, but we really want to scale things up and make an instance of Hoppscotch which are enterprise ready and available for enterprise organizations. So Hoppscotch for enterprise is one of the most important things that we are developing at the moment and it can be deployed in a couple of months. We are really focusing on that, but at the same time, we have a very active open source aspect to the product, which is why we'll be also focusing on a self-hostable Hoppscotch instance which will give the 100% ownership of the platform to individuals, or teams, or small-scale startups, because at Hoppscotch, we are dealing with very sensitive data and if user don't have 100% control over it, there are chances for being abused by the data, because we are dealing with API tokens and they are very sensitive.

So the self-hostable version which will have a lot of features and it can be hosted under the company's domain or totally within the organization and they can own 100% data within the organization. So the self host and the Hoppscotch for enterprise are the two main things that we are working on, on our future plans.

Brian: Awesome. Might feel non sequitur, but I want to actually touch back on the original part of this conversation when you mentioned you had got access to your sister's computer. Now, we're looking at Hoppscotch, it's now a project that has contributors and I saw actually from Max Stoiber, who is a very prominent open source developer, he got started when he was 16, worked in a bunch of companies that you've heard of. One thing he had mentioned is, when his project took off and got tons of stars, his dad asked, "Are you famous yet?" I'm curious, what do your parents think and your sister think about where you are today?

Liyas: They are very proud of our growth, because last week, I was announced as one of the recipients of GitHub open source grants and it literally came in newspapers and all. So they saw that news and they are very proud of what I have achieved, but it's something that they really wanted me to do it. So, just happy about it.

Brian: That's awesome. Are your parents involved in engineering or anything like that or did your sister get engineering?

Liyas: No, no, no. I mean, my parents don't have any clue about engineering and stuff that I do. They're just happy for my work and being an expert at my profession. They are not dealing with engineering at all. 

Brian: Excellent. Yeah, that's awesome. You have the support of your family too, as well. Again, congratulations on that GitHub Grant and the future open source work that you'll be doing.

Liyas: Thanks.

Neha: I also think there are so many of us who have parents who are proud of us, but they actually don't understand exactly what it is. So they're like, "Cool, this sounds like a big milestone, are we celebrating?" And you're like, "Yes, we're celebrating." So it sounds like that's more similar. But is there any values or any principles that your parents instilled that you use today?

Liyas: Yes. I mean, we actually came from a very middle-class family and they always say that you have to look at your footprints and you have to be thankful for the achievements that you have done. It's not just because of your effort, you are in such a place. It's also because of the prayers, some things that others might have put off, so that I can have that in my life, so just being grateful for what I have done and being thankful for the presents that I have received. This is something my parents always tell me.

Neha: Well, that's definitely a community minded approach, right? Being able to work with the open source community and having that mentality, I feel like those are so complimentary with each other.

Brian: Yeah. In open source, it is honestly about the footprints that you impact in the community, because if you weren't making space for contributors to come and join you along this path, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about Hoppscotch. So they're taking a look at your footprints, but also the footprints that you're also guiding is like a really nice way to think about this entire story and open source, in general.

Neha: Yes, those footprints are key and we leave footprints in all kinds of ways. Liyas is in the process of writing a book, one of the greatest footprints you can leave behind. We couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask him what readers can expect. 

Liyas: It's all about finding the passion project for you. It's actually a quite tough task to find someone's passion, and being an artist and developer, it's again was like a war in-between me to find what my true passion is. The switching careers is again, one of the tough things that I have been seeing in the tech industry. So I have to address these steps, how to choose your passion and how to make a product or a project that really resonates with your passion and not just because someone asks you to do it, but because you want to do it. The book is about finding your passion and how to excel in it? It's a small book.

Neha: Being based in India and now in Kerala, what's your connection with the open source community locally and could you give us a picture of what that open source community looks like in Kerala and South India or in India compared to what you're observing otherwise?

Liyas: I have been trying really hard to get the open source culture as spread as possible. I'm really grateful to MV Karan from GitHub India for providing all the resources, so that I can communicate with the college students here in Kerala and especially, all over from India. And starting up with events and community projects that literally takes students, especially college students, to start contributing to open source. We have a lot of plans regarding that. We have been organizing a lot of events that encourage students to start contributing to open source, but it's an ongoing process. It's something that requires a lot of time and effort and a lot of effort from the entire society as well. So we are working on it.

Neha: Yeah. What parts are easy about it? I think that there are some values that are easy and resonate with people. What parts of it are particularly easy and what parts are particularly hard about that?

Liyas: Getting started with open source is pretty easy nowadays. Now we have platforms like GitHub and all, which allows to do it as easy as possible. But finding the motivation to continue contributing to open source is a very tough task as a newbie is concerned, because at first I did not get this 31,000 plus GitHub stars or this very good reception on working in open source project. But finding that motivation which actually comes from within you is what, that really helps to cultivate that open source contributing culture and that's the hardest part. But once you are convinced the result will come, after getting a maturity period with your open source project, if you keep on contributing to it and staying on track is one thing that I really encourage the newcomers to open source project domain.

Brian: Regardless of what we do, whether it’s making art or writing code, we are all wanting to tap into what moves us, what motivates us to continue doing what we’re doing. Discovering that passion can be hard but it sounds like Liyas is on the right track to doing that. Here’s some advice on just that.

Liyas: I would say, finding an activity which actually comes from within your heart and being able to do that, being lucky to do that is what, that actually resonates with your passion and to do some activities such as that, it really needs a lot of motivation. I mean, I would say, self-motivation from your end. And, if you have that, no one can stop you and if you give it enough time, it will get you to places. I mean, it can be contributing to open source, it can be making an app, or it can be making art pieces or writing. But if you give it enough time and if you love every second of it, eventually you will reach on top of the world.

Neha: I've seen this quote before that you said, which is, have a vision and everything is possible. What's your vision right now that you're working towards?

Liyas: Well, I would say helping others is my vision. It's not something very, very specific about making software products, but also being a volunteer to some good cause, or helping someone relieve their depression by making art. So as a norm, helping someone without expecting anything in return is my vision.

Neha: I feel like that's a good ending point for us, huh? I just wanted to thank you so much. I feel like I've learned so much about you and about the project, but also you've invigorated my spirit around having this community-based approach and seeing the beauty in the minimalism.  And almost just going with the flow and you never know what's going to be really popular and what's not. But once you have an in and you have the ability to create something bigger to solve people's problems, to go with it. So I'm going to be taking that with me for my future and look for those opportunities as well. So thank you so much.

Brian: Yes. Thanks, Liyas.

Liyas: Thank you for having me. It's been a great opportunity for me.

Brian: It was great to speak with Liyas Thomas and have him on the ReadME Podcast. To learn more about Liyas and his work, please visit liyasthomas.web.app. That’s L-I-Y-A-S thomas dot web dot app. 

I am Brian Douglas, aka bdougie.

Neha: And I am Neha Batra aka nerdneha. The ReadME Podcast is a GitHub podcast that dives into the challenges our guests faced and how they overcame those hurdles. In sharing these stories, we hope to provide a spotlight on what you don’t always see in the lines of code, and what it took to build the technology that inspires us all. 

Brian:  It’s also been really great spending time with you. The ReadME Podcast is part of the ReadME Project at GitHub, a space that amplifies the voices of the developer community: The maintainers, leaders, and the teams whose contributions move the world forward every day. Visit GitHub.com/readme to learn more.

Our theme music has been produced on GitHub by Dan Gorelick with Tidal Cycles. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. 

The ReadME Podcast is produced by Sound Made Public for GitHub.

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