The Origin of the Lettuce Project

Source: Dev.to

Background

Two years ago, Jason and I started what became known as the BLT Lettuce Project with a very simple goal: make it easier for newcomers to OWASP to find their way.

I’ve been part of OWASP for over a decade. Every year, like clockwork, we see a wave of students arriving for Google Summer of Code, along with many others who are simply curious and looking for a place to start. They all ask the same question in different ways:

“Where do I begin?”

OWASP is an incredible ecosystem of projects, but to someone new, it can feel overwhelming. Repositories, documentation, Slack channels, mailing lists, project pages—it’s a lot to navigate without a guide.

In a conversation with Jason, we realized something important: the best place to meet people at that moment was right where they already were—Slack. So we built a simple idea: a welcome message. That idea became Lettuce.

From Idea to First Commit

The concept quickly moved from conversation to code. The first commit landed on February 29 2024, marking the start of the initial prototype. On March 13 2024, Jason sent me a refined summary of the project via Slack—helping crystallize the vision and direction that Lettuce would take from that point forward.

I built the initial prototype, and with the help of some GSoC students, we refined it and launched. It wasn’t complex. It didn’t need to be. Lettuce did one thing very well: it helped people get oriented.

Quiet Launch, Real Impact

The first public introduction of Lettuce happened organically, posted to Slack on June 19 2024 at 8:03 PM—no announcement campaign, no marketing push. Since then, it has quietly helped nearly 6,000 newcomers get their first introduction to OWASP in a way that felt approachable rather than overwhelming. No fanfare.

The Growing Pains

During our GSoC journey, we ran into practical issues:

• Hosting reliability
• Servers going down
• Maintenance challenges

These are the kind of problems every early project encounters. To keep the experience stable for users, we temporarily moved the Slack functionality into the main BLT project, where it has been running reliably for some time. The original vision, however, was always for Lettuce to stand on its own.

A Parallel Problem: Project Freshness

As I became more involved on the OWASP Project Committee, another recurring issue became impossible to ignore: stale projects—projects that were abandoned. I decided to try my hand at addressing it by building a project freshness prototype, inspired in part by Simon Bennetts’ work on an OWASP projects dashboard.

The result was a very lightweight, project‑list‑based approach—not meant to judge projects, but to provide signals and visibility so contributors could make informed decisions. That work directly influenced how I thought about onboarding, discovery, and guidance—and it fed back into the evolving vision for Lettuce.

Returning to the Original Vision

We are now in the process of separating Lettuce back out into a dedicated, standalone project. We’re also restoring the original name—because it still fits perfectly:

Lettuce → “Let us get started.”

More importantly, we’re returning to Jason’s original vision: not just a welcome message, but a structured, hierarchical guide through OWASP’s project ecosystem. A way for newcomers and GSoC contributors to:

• Discover projects that match their interests
• Understand where and how to contribute
• Navigate repositories without confusion
• Feel confident instead of lost

Beyond OWASP

What we learned from Lettuce is that this problem is not unique to OWASP. Any organization with many repositories, many projects, and a steady influx of new contributors faces the same challenge: onboarding at scale. That’s where Lettuce is headed next—a reusable approach that other GSoC organizations and large open‑source communities can adopt, guiding newcomers through Slack (or similar platforms) while surfacing healthy, active projects and clear paths to contribution.

Why This Matters

Lettuce was never about building something flashy. It was about solving a very real, very human problem we observed year after year: people want to contribute. They just don’t know where to start. Sometimes, the simplest ideas—meeting people where they are and giving them a clear first step—end up helping thousands. That’s the story of Lettuce.