2025 marks the third year of our annual Dev Days program – a 24-hour virtual hackathon designed to bring in new contributors to the Foundation’s open source projects. For the first time this year, we hosted two standalone Dev Days events – one in the spring and one in the fall, giving people more opportunities to contribute.
We’re thrilled to say that 2025 saw our biggest community turn out yet with 53 participants contributing to 13 ASWF projects, closing 59 pull requests – a 68% increase over 2024! Community members joined from countries around the world including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Thailand, India, and more.
We also hosted in-person meetups for Dev Days participants in both Vancouver and Los Angeles, offering a valuable IRL networking component that was appreciated by local contributors and project leaders alike.
Each participating project was able to make tangible progress – for instance, with eight Dev Days participants, OpenCue was able to merge a variety of pull requests that significantly strengthened the project through broader test coverage, new REST API endpoints, and improved documentation.
A small team from Sony Pictures Imageworks contributed to MaterialX by implementing an Open Shading Language code generator that emits shader group command strings. For Chris Hellmuth, a Rendering Software Engineer at Sony Pictures Imageworks, it was his first time participating in Dev Days. He shared, “I thought Dev Days was fun, challenging, and I enjoyed working with others outside my usual Arnold group. In the past, I’ve worked on some MaterialX stuff, but it was just prototyping. What was fun about Dev Days was getting the code to a high enough quality to be merged into MaterialX. It felt great getting feedback from the community that it was useful for solving their problems.”
Bringing in new contributors is critical to success for open source projects – both for growing and maintaining each individual project, and for helping to streamline the overall efforts of the Academy Software Foundation. Dev Days is specifically designed to be a welcoming on-ramp for new contributors, offering straightforward tasks that can be accomplished in one day, and access to project leaders and maintainers for guidance. Contributors are able to work on any of the Foundation’s many projects based on what interests them the most.
Olga Avramenko, a co-organizer of Dev Days, shared, “It’s such an immense pleasure to organize this event for the third year running. After each one, participants tell me how great it was to take part, to meet other developers, and to learn about and collaborate on software that is the backbone of the visual effects and other industries. I believe the reason people enjoy participating is because the community is so open and welcoming — there really are no barriers to entry. If you’re willing to show up and join the ASWF open source community, it’s here for you!”
The Dev Days 2026 dates will be announced in early 2026. In the meantime, you can learn more about the program and register your interest here. Also join our #devdays Slack channel for the latest conversations.
