Saalim Aqueel
Saalim Aqueel is an open-source developer and MSc AI & ML student at Jamia Millia Islamia. He is a Google Summer of Code 2026 contributor with FOSSASIA, working primarily across the Eventyay ecosystem. His work includes building the Eventyay Social Media Plugin for automating event promotion, contributing to the Eventyay platform, and collaborating on VEditor, an open-source video processing and review system for conference recordings. His interests span backend engineering, developer tooling, GenAI/ML, and open-source software. He enjoys working on practical systems that integrate into existing platforms and turn complex workflows into reliable, reusable tools.
Sessions
Most first-time contributors never make it past setup. In this workshop, we set up together and then spend the session on real code in Eventyay, FOSSASIA's open source event platform. Conferences use it for ticketing, calls for speakers, schedules and online events.
You'll clone the repository and bring up the full stack with Docker Compose. This runs Django, PostgreSQL, Redis and Celery on your laptop, with sample data and live reload, so your changes show up instantly.
Next, you'll learn to find your way around a real Django + Vue codebase. We'll look at how the containers fit together, where the code behind each page lives, and how to read the logs. Then you'll pick a small issue prepared for this workshop, such as a template, text or UI fix. You'll create a branch, test your change and are ready for your first pull requests.
You'll leave with a working development setup, and a workflow you can reuse. Ready for more?
Bring: A laptop with Docker and Git installed, plus a GitHub account.
Most first-time contributors never make it past setup. In this workshop, we set up together and then spend the session on real code in Eventyay, FOSSASIA's open source event platform. Conferences use it for ticketing, calls for speakers, schedules and online events.
You'll clone the repository and bring up the full stack with Docker Compose. This runs Django, PostgreSQL, Redis and Celery on your laptop, with sample data and live reload, so your changes show up instantly.
Next, you'll learn to find your way around a real Django + Vue codebase. We'll look at how the containers fit together, where the code behind each page lives, and how to read the logs. Then you'll pick a small issue prepared for this workshop, such as a template, text or UI fix. You'll create a branch, test your change and are ready for your first pull requests.
You'll leave with a working development setup, and a workflow you can reuse. Ready for more?
Bring: A laptop with Docker and Git installed, plus a GitHub account.
Event platforms already contain the information organizers repeatedly need to publish: speakers, sessions, schedules, tracks, and event links. The problem is that this information often remains locked inside the event workflow, while promotion happens separately across different social platforms.
As part of GSoC 2026 with FOSSASIA, I worked on extending Eventyay with a Social Media Plugin that connects these two workflows. The plugin uses Eventyay’s existing event data to create and manage promotional content, while providing a provider-based architecture that can support different social platforms without coupling the core workflow to any single service.
In this lightning talk, I’ll walk through the design decisions behind the plugin, how event-specific data can drive social-media workflows, and some of the challenges of building a new cross-cutting feature inside an established open-source project.