Building Bridges

[taniashiba]

The energy was infectious at #AIAgentHackNight with MCP in Atlanta, and the goose tour doesn’t stop there. Explore new open source bridges being built, learn about the next IRL event taking place in SF, and catch up on what’s new at Block Open Source.

New Milestones

We’ve published Bitkey's source code since we launched a year ago, so anyone can see how it works and use it for non-commercial purposes. Now, BitKey is a fully open source license! moving to a fully open-source license. Tell us what you want to build with it.

Block collaborated with Salesforce to open source sf-deity, to simulate data corruption and test recovery tools. The project won Own Backup's Innovator of the Year award in 2024 at Dreamforce. Check it out at https://github.com/block/sf-deity

@dhanji, CTO at Block, was a guest speaker at Databricks x Anthropic's virtual event, where Databricks and Anthropic discussed their new partnership, why AI agents are important, and shared real-life examples of customers using AI agents to accomplish domain-specific solutions.

The Goose Tour Continues

After sold out events in Boston and NYC, we brought the #AIAgentHackNight magic to Atlanta! For this event, we collaborated with the AI Tinkerers Atlanta, Render Atlanta, and Atlanta Tech Week communities. From insightful talks like "APIs Just Wanna Have Fun" by @angiejones, to an intro to codename goose by @a-giuliano, to How to Build an MCP Server by @andrewtabit, everyone got their hands dirty building and exploring the possibilities of AI agents and MCP. We even got to spotlight how goose helped Ashlynn Turner create a time-saving tool at work during Hack Week at Block. 🚀

And we're not slowing down. The next meet up is in San Francisco, and..it’s already sold out! To be the first to RSVP for our next meetup, you can subscribe to our meetup calendar.🔥

Monthly Contributor Spotlight

This is our first edition of the Monthly Contributor Spotlight program! Every month, we will spotlight the top 5 contributors from the Block Open Source community. From hefty PRs to those who help answer member discussions day-to-day, we wanted to make sure those who make our community a fun learning experience feel special. Here are our top 5 for this month:

Apr.2025.-.Monthly.Contributor.Spotlight.Commercial.mp4

Thank you so much to each of you for your contributions! As thanks, you receive an exclusive badge on Discord, plus $20 of free LLM credits! The team will reach out to you with more info. Thank you for being part of the magic that is open source.

In Case You Missed It

We always aim to make sure everyone across the world gets access to the latest learnings from Goose with blogs, demo videos and more. So if you can't join us at IRL meetups, don't worry! We got you.

Here are some of the top blogs for you to check out:

• A Recipe for Success: Cooking Up Repeatable Agentic Workflows 🧑🏾‍🍳 — Ratatouille isn't just a heartwarming (and slightly unhygienic) film about a rat chef. It's also analogous to a popular tech trend: AI agents and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• How One Contribution Can Spark Many Wins 💡 — Sometimes, what feels like "just a small fix" can end up reshaping an open source project or inspiring a brand new feature. Here's how one of our top contributors turned a small build fix into important improvements for the Goose experience.
• 4 Things You Need to Know Before Using Goose 🪿 — Goose is a local, open source AI agent that can automate tasks, interact with your codebase, and connect to a growing ecosystem of tools. But before you hit install, here are four things you should know to get the most out of it.
• MCP in the Enterprise: Real World Adoption at Block ✨ — At Block, we've been exploring how to make AI agents genuinely useful in a business setting. Not just for demos or prototypes, but for real, everyday work. While others are still experimenting, we've rolled this out company-wide at Block, and with real impact.
• MCP Is Rewriting the Rules of API Integration 🤖 — As developers, we're always looking for ways to build more efficient, scalable, and intelligent applications. For years, RESTful APIs have been our go-to for connecting services. Here are some ways you can integrate AI agents and MCP into your existing API infrastructure to make it smarter, more efficient, and easier to maintain.

For more visual learners and podcast listeners, here are some short videos and clips from the last month:

• Build Apps Faster with AI | Vibe Coding with Goose - In this video, Anthony Giuliano walks through a demo of vibe coding a to do list app with Goose. Vibe coding is a new practice that involves building an application by only using AI prompts.
• We vibecoded a drawing app with Goose! | Vibe Coding Competition Highlights - This is the best of the first episode of The Great Goose Off — a fast-paced Vibe Coding competition using Goose and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). @Kvadratni and Daniel Shapiro had the same coding task and time limit, but different prompts and MCP servers. Hosted by @blackgirlbytes!

Upcoming Events

If you’d like to catch one of our streams live, you can subscribe to us on YouTube, or subscribe to our events calendar here. Here’s what’s coming up next:

• Can Non-Developers Vibe Code? | Great Goose Off — May 20, 2025 at 1pm ET - The Great Goose Off is a live showdown where humans go head-to-head using Goose, an open-source AI agent and MCP client, to solve fun, bite-sized challenges. Same challenge, different prompts.

May.16.-.May.20.Coming.Up.Next.mp4

Keep Up with Block Open Source

To get this newsletter delivered directly in your inbox each month, follow the discussions here or on LinkedIn.

You can also follow us on the official Block Open Source social channels to keep up with what’s new. We’re on YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Discord, Bluesky, and Nostr.

Thank you so much for reading, until next time~

@taniashiba, Editor

~ Block Open Source