This post is the first in a series of posts related to my Google Summer of Code ‘20 project.

I have a habit of opening stuff up.


Whenever I find something that needs repair, or when I’m just feeling curious, I get my tools out. It leaves me in awe every time I see the internals of a machine - it’s so easy to take for granted all the engineering and planning that goes into making something. It’s simply fascinating, the process of creating and fixing things. This is the reason why I love computers so much and why I was attracted to the open source community. People from all around the world collaborating to create cool software? Count me in!

This is also why I think working in Information Security is so cool. It’s only when you’re able to fully understand a technology that you can begin to find vulnerabilities in it. It is my opinion that if one wants to work in security, they have to dedicate their lives to learning - to be up to date with the latest technologies, to understand the ins and outs of how things work and be able to think out of the box.

I thought Google Summer of Code was a good reason to finally start contributing to open source, and when looking for suitable organisations, I stumbled upon this blog post about OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy. I was convinced that ZAP was the right project for me.

The ZAP developer community is very friendly and helpful. Even with little prior experience I was able to set up my development environment and start contributing, and my proposal was accepted eventually.

The title of my Google Summer of Code 2020 project is “Adding Support for GraphQL Security Testing to ZAP”. You can find my proposal here. I have enabled comments on it so feel free to suggest anything.


- - -


I use Linux for development. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the distribution I’m on currently. For writing code, I use VS Code, and I build and run the ZAP source code with the provided Gradle Wrapper.

Some useful resources that helped me in authoring last week’s pull request:

I’d like to give my mentors Simon, Rick, and Ricardo a quick shout-out and thank them for taking out time from their busy schedules to guide me. They’re great people, and you’d love working with them too! Hop on over to #zaproxy on Freenode IRC and say hi when you’re ready to contribute to ZAP :).