Appwrite OSS Fund Sponsors Mockoon
Tags: opensource, api, webdev, appwrite
Published: 2022-06-30 13:55:01

{% youtube QbIhKq7yrn8 %}

Hi readers 👋 hope you are doing well. Today we will be talking about the OSS Fund and the first project we choose to sponsor **—** Mockoon.

## 🤔 What Is OSS Fund? 
On the 4th of May, the Appwrite team launched the [OSS Fund](https://appwrite.io/oss-fund), an initiative to support open-source project maintainers. Being an open-source company, we wanted to give back to the community and help as many people as we can. 

The OSS Fund is an initiative that is very close to our heart. 
Hear what our Founder and CEO has to say - The Appwrite Story:
{% embed https://appwrite.io/oss-fund-announcement %}

Soon after the launch, we will showered with a lot of support and love from the community and that brought us load of applications. A month later, a [review committee](https://twitter.com/appwrite/status/1532025391552110592?s=20&t=FpofGW7hnkONyPILOeZeSw) was setup and thus began the application review process. It's quite a task to select just 20 our of the many amazing projects we receive, and our committee is working hard to go through each application in detail!


> ### 📢 Announcing The First Project 
> After careful considerations from the committee we are thrilled to announce the first project:
> {% embed https://twitter.com/appwrite/status/1541697422727979008?s=20&t=FpofGW7hnkONyPILOeZeSw %}
> _Note: We aim to announce one project every week_

## 🤔 What Is Mockoon? 
[Mockoon](https://github.com/mockoon) is the easiest and quickest way to design and run mock REST APIs. No remote deployment, no account required, free and open-source.

It's a desktop application and a CLI that help you work faster with APIs by mocking them. It also helps you integrate third-party APIs quicker, improve your integration tests, speed up your development, and more.

[Mockoon](https://mockoon.com/) offers many features, such as:
- Unlimited number of mock local servers and routes
- CLI to run your mock in headless environments, CI, etc.
- Complete control on routes definition: HTTP methods and statuses, regex paths, file serving, custom headers, etc.
- OpenAPI compatibility and more


## 🤝 Meet The Maintainer 
Behind every open-source project is a maintainer(s) who works tirelessly to make the project better everyday. 
The superhero behind Mockoon is [Guillaume Monnet](https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumemonnet/) - a lawyer turned software developer.

Guillaume hails from Luxembourg and has been a passionate coder since high school. But life had its way, and he took up law for his studies and ended up being a lawyer for 6 years. He juggled between being a lawyer during the day and a programmer at night, and realized that his love lies in coding. Thus he switched paths towards a full-time programming job at a banking company.

Before becoming a full-time software developer, he and his friend built Snippets **—** Instagram for pets. Immense competition and lack of funds did not let him continue with the project, but it acted as a cherry-on-top on his resume and helped him get on TV! 

## 💡 How Did The Idea Of Mockoon come up? 
Guillaume was the frontend lead in his company, and from a random discussion on the backend, when the APIs needed were not ready, the idea of Mockoon sprang up! The team wanted API mocking tools, the ones available were on the cloud and could not be used in banking sectors. The need of the hour was a desktop application that could mock APIs, and thus in the year 2017. Mockoon came to life.

## 🚘 The Journey So Far 
From being a random idea to having 20,000 monthly active users and 250000+ downloads, Mockoon has come a long way. However, the journey wasn't very smooth at the start. Guillaume wanted to give back to the community and help people build with his tool, but all of this came at a cost - of being burned out in September 2020. Having a full-time job and catering to all the issues, feature requests, and PRs of the project took a toll on his mental health. It was hard for him to decide and choose, but with a supportive family by his side, he finally decided to become a full-time maintainer and dedicate all his time to building Mockoon.  

## 🗒️ Ending Notes 
Guillaume is continuing to invest in open source as his full-time job, and this is exactly why we want to support maintainers like him.

If this story resonates with you or your friend, tell them about OSS Fund, as applications are still open:
{% embed https://appwrite.io/oss-fund %}

For questions, reach out to us on:
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/appwrite)
- [Discord](appwrite.io/discord)