# A Year of Open Source (2016) — Liran Tal We recently celebrated Rosh Hashana, which is the Jewish New Year, so obviously a lot of self examination which translate to us engineers… Canonical: https://lirantal.com/blog/a-year-of-open-source-2016-5886b0535286 We recently celebrated [Rosh Hashana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_Hashanah), which is the Jewish New Year, so obviously a lot of self examination which translate to us engineers as a Retrospective. ![](/images/blog/0__QeqR3twYbvCVdpea.png) This year has been yet another wonderful engagement with open source communities for me. So many new technologies, and many more repositories that I contributed to and new projects I started. Here are some highlights of this year for me: ### Speaking Public speaking isn’t natural to me since I’m a classic introvert, but lucky for me we have [Morad Stern](http://twitter.com/morad) in HPE, who manages the developer communities, and supported me to take this step. ![](/images/blog/1__Krmd4TFBrFDARfgK4HEyyA.png) [**Liran Tal talks about the Rise of Open Source & MEAN Stack in Enterprise at #helloJS** \_Liran, man, you were incredible at helloJS!\_blog.hellojs.org](https://blog.hellojs.org/liran-tal-talks-about-the-rise-of-open-source-mean-stack-in-enterprise-b9cf0e242f9d "https://blog.hellojs.org/liran-tal-talks-about-the-rise-of-open-source-mean-stack-in-enterprise-b9cf0e242f9d")[](https://blog.hellojs.org/liran-tal-talks-about-the-rise-of-open-source-mean-stack-in-enterprise-b9cf0e242f9d) The previous year I did local meetups but this year was **exceptional in order of magnitude:** * The amazing [Paul Brie](https://twitter.com/aelythe) and [Amalia Pomian](https://twitter.com/amaliatweets) invited me to speak about [Open Source and the JavaScript MEAN Stack](http://www.slideshare.net/LiranTal1/open-source-and-the-mean-stack) in [hello.js](http://hellojs.org/) conference that turned out to host an overwhelming 300 participants. I made a lot of great friends and was immediately hooked to the vibe and attitude of the Cluj people in Romania. * [Morad](https://twitter.com/morad) landed GitHub own heroes [David Newman](http://twitter.com/newmerator) and [Aziz Shamim](http://twitter.com/azizshamim) for a hosted public GitHub Day event where I was speaking on similar topics. * With a lot of respect to the security community in Israel, I was also invited to speak at [OWASP AppSec](http://appsecil2016.sched.org/) about [Node.js Security](http://www.slideshare.net/LiranTal1/nodejs-security-done-right-tips-and-tricks-they-wont-teach-you-in-school) with a great crowed and much interest in the hands-on session. I can’t stress enough how important it is to take part in speaking at meetups and conferences. It’s an amazing experience to spread the knowledge and connect about many ideas with other speakers. As Nike say, **Just do it**! ![](/images/blog/0__wKFhVBmo7E1AHtJ6.jpg) ### Open Source Fun I’ve been in love with open source since my early youth. The community, the people, the openness and collaboration is magical. Stressing another important topic — the value of side projects and contribution to open source. ### MEAN.JS Those whom are following me know that I’m passionately maintaining the wonderful and lean [MEAN.JS](http://github.com/meanjs/mean) framework. This year we’ve done so much, such as: * The release of MEAN.JS 0.5.0 * **Closing hundreds** of PRs and Issues (some were much outdated) * All dependencies are up to date and secure with [Snyk.io](http://snyk.io/) reporting zero vulnerabilities and Bithound scores 91 for dependency analysis. ### Security In this yearly OWASP [AppSec IL 2016](http://appsecil2016.sched.org/) I spoke about [Node.js Security](http://www.slideshare.net/LiranTal1/nodejs-security-done-right-tips-and-tricks-they-wont-teach-you-in-school) with live demo and many accompanying source code and documentation on how to get it right for Node.js web developers. I also created [gulp-mraudit](http://github.com/lirantal/gulp-mraudit) which is a small gulp plugin to scan your project for insecure source code and alert when best practices aren’t taken into account. It mainly conveys the importance of security as part of your CI process. ### ES5, Babel, Webpack Today’s JavaScript ecosystem heavily relies on many frameworks and tools to package web, mobile and desktop applications. I took the plunge to keep up just like everyone else. It’s much more fun when you practically use them in real world projects so: * I joined up Deepak to update and migrate to ES5 his [PDF-To-Text](http://github.com/fagbokforlaget/pdftotextjs) Node.js library. * Writing a few articles (stay tuned!) ### Angular2 Angular2 was officially released (finally! phew). If you plan on also keeping up with that I recommend going for the [angular-cli](http://github.com/angular/angular-cli) generator project as it is kept up to date with Angular2 best practices, project structure, and general updates. My recent fun Angular2 projects: * [CRON Quartz Web](http://lirantal.github.io/cron-quartz-web/) — it’s a web based conversion utility that is based on my [cron-to-quartz](http://github.com/lirantal/cron-quartz-web) Node.js package. * AtomBundles — Not yet live, but it’s my next upcoming web project for easily picking up a collection of Atom packages for your favorite programming platorm. How cool is that? So help me out with PRs: [https://github.com/lirantal/atombundles](http://github.com/lirantal/atombundles) ### daloRADIUS You would think that a project I built a decade ago for managing WiFi Hotspots, and FreeRADIUS would be obsolete by now but this is hardly the case. The [daloRADIUS](http://daloradius.com/) community is still kicking with over a weekly 1300 downloads and a **total of ~350,000 downloads** of this niche piece of web software I wrote when I just started out taking the web seriously. I now manage the project source code in GitHub and there has been some reviving recent activity there: * PHP 7 support for daloRADIUS. * Docker-based image for quickly getting up and running. * Security, and bug fixes contributed by other community members. ### In Summary The list is too long to list everything but this year has been nothing short of pure open source and technology awesomeness for me. I am planning on closing 2016 with some great upcoming projects so stay tuned! ## More writing [All writing →](/blog) * Sep 5, 2026 ### [Self-Hosting Hermes Agent with Matrix E2EE on Proxmox](/blog/self-host-hermes-agent-matrix-e2ee-proxmox) * Aug 2, 2026 ### [The Practical Second Brain: Building an LLM-Operated Markdown Knowledge Graph](/blog/practical-second-brain-llm-markdown-knowledge-graph) * Aug 1, 2026 ### [Building a Second Brain with LLMs and AI Agents](/blog/building-second-brain-llms-ai-agents) * * * Liran Tal is the author of the book [Node.js Secure Coding: Defending Against Command Injection Vulnerabilities](https://www.nodejs-security.com/) [Start Building Secure Node.js Applications ↗](https://www.nodejs-security.com/) [![](/_astro/nodejs-secure-coding-book-3d-style.DiTWpzFs_Z3c7s1.png)](https://www.nodejs-security.com/)