If there’s one thing we can all agree on is that open source rocks. Without it, we would most likely still be trying to write our own web server from scratch. But thanks to the love, dedication and sense of community of thousands of developers from around the world, we get to build on their experiences to tackle our own unique challenges.

Compared to other industries, this is a truly fortunate position to be in. We have access to tremendous amounts of accumulated knowledge, which helps us to learn faster, produce more, and make users happier while at it. Because of this, we feel we have a responsibility to give back to those who’ve helped us along the way.

With that in mind, we’re excited to kick off our Picnic open source initiative. The first batch of projects we’re releasing will be a collection of rather small internal projects and helper libraries, because in the end…why keep it just to ourselves? We have dozens of projects and hundreds of thousands of lines of code in a variety of different languages (Java, Kotlin, Swift, Python, Scala, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, etc), which will all make their way into the open source world during 2018, so stay tuned!

Here’s a summary of our initial batch:

• Apibot: a tool that makes complex integration test easy to write, fast to run and reliably to verify.

• FingerPaintView: an Android library built in Kotlin to paint over bitmaps and save them.

• Pingdom Probes: a Script for syncing Pingdom probe IPv4 addresses to AWS security groups.

Want to contribute? Take a look at our open source page at http://picnic.tech