Written by Kat Scott
Following the excitement of ROSCon Global 2026, the Open Robotics hosted our second official post-conference hackathon on Friday, September 25th, at the Google office in Toronto. Building on the momentum of our inaugural hackathon after ROSCon Global 2025 in Singapore, this gathering brought together developers from around the world to write code, exchange ideas, and collaborate face to face.
The central mission of the day was clear: "If you’ve never contributed to our open source projects we want you to make your first contribution today! If you are a regular contributor we want to use this time to work with your colleagues to do what you need to do, together!" By demystifying the contribution process, we wanted to help participants at every stage of their open source journey, whether starting out as users and pull request reviewers, stepping up as code contributors and committers, or growing into project maintainers.
The full-day event offered a schedule that paired focused technical work with shared open-source camaraderie. We kicked off the morning with an orientation session designed to welcome newcomers and map out areas of interest, followed by dedicated working sprints where participants tackled outstanding issues alongside project leads. To ensure that everyone made progress and had a productive experience, representatives from all five of our core open source projects (ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, ros-controls, and Infrastructure) were on site to mentor new contributors, offer technical advice, and review pull requests in real time. The productive momentum continued through a pizza lunch generously sponsored by OSRA member Intrinsic, giving everyone a chance to connect and share stories from the field before diving back into afternoon development, bug triage, and feature work.
Beyond pushing commits and merging pull requests, the hackathon served as an invaluable opportunity for our core developers to collaborate in person on long-standing challenges. It also provided our PMC members with firsthand insight into the onboarding friction and setup hurdles faced by first-time contributors. In appreciation of the collective effort, every participant took home our first-ever limited edition ✨sparkly✨ ROSCon Hackathon sticker.
During the wrap-up session, PMC members nominated ten standout contributors for special recognition, awarding them coupon codes for official Open Robotics merchandise. We are proud to congratulate @samialperen, @Gloterianota349, @Rajat-Arora, @gatetub, @Iamwilliamli, @CPollreis, @EkenoSamson, @raulrochoa, @gtfrans2re, and @gerardomoreno-82 for their exceptional impact. For those who want to browse the apparel and gear our winners took home, our official items are available at https://store.openrobotics.org.
The energy in Toronto demonstrated how much our community can accomplish when we work together, and we are eager to carry that momentum forward for ROSCon Global 2027, which will take place in Krakow, Poland, throughout the week of October 11th.
If you want to get involved with contributing to open source, you do not need to wait for our next hackathon to get started! New contributors are more than welcome to join our weekly Waffle meeting to get assigned a pull request to review, or attend our bi-weekly Office Hours meeting to ask questions and discuss technical ideas. Times and details for our regular Open Robotics events and online meetings can be found on our public calendar. If you want to get started right away, each of our projects (ROS, Gazebo,ros-controls, Open-RMF, and Infrastructure) maintains a dedicated contributor guide to help configure your local environment, as well as a list of accessible tasks on GitHub with the tag “good-first-issue”. If you hit any roadblocks along the way, our community is always available to assist and answer questions on our Zulip chat server.
