Advancing Hoppscotch: Enhancing an Open Source API Development Platform
Contributing to Hoppscotch, an open-source API development ecosystem, by improving features, performance, and developer experience through meaningful code contributions.
Hoppscotch is a fantastic open-source API development tool — basically the lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Postman and Insomnia that so many developers love. It has over 77.9k stars on GitHub, runs under the MIT license, and is super actively maintained (the latest release, 2026.1.1, came out on February 5, 2026, with fixes for things like scroll bugs in recent Chrome versions, macOS auth cookies, database leaks, and better mock server/OpenAPI support).
It lets developers build, test, debug, document, and collaborate on APIs easily, handling everything from classic REST/HTTP to GraphQL, WebSocket, SSE, Socket.IO, MQTT, and more. You can use it right in the browser (as an offline-capable PWA), on desktop apps for Windows, macOS, or Linux, or even through the CLI.
Here's what our team is focusing on:
UI/UX and accessibility — polishing up themes, Zen mode, keyboard shortcuts, better internationalization (i18n support for more languages), and accessibility tweaks so it's easier for everyone around the world to use.
Core features and tooling — improving how requests are handled, adding better pre- and post-request scripting (with JS and tests), environments/variables, collection syncing, code generation in tons of languages, proxy for bypassing CORS issues, and support for realtime protocols.
Bug fixes and performance — hunting down memory leaks, making large responses smoother, optimizing the backend, and just making everything more stable overall.
Docs and onboarding — beefing up self-hosting instructions (like Docker setups), contributor guides, and anything that makes it easier for new people to get started or jump in and contribute.
Community work — submitting clean pull requests, helping triage issues, joining discussions, and supporting the maintainers to keep the project moving strong.
I'm excited because Hoppscotch is already used by millions, and small contributions here can have a big ripple effect. It fits perfectly with what FOSS Hack is all about — real, meaningful open-source work in a welcoming community.