Block Open Source Is Taking Flight!

[taniacryptid]

We learned so much this past month. Working together to launch the Block Open Source Program Office and codename goose, as well as support the growing open source community has been magical. I’m talking Thanos-snapped, drinking the best coffee on a Monday morning, “doing some of that pilot stuff” kind of magical. (Bonus love to you if you get the reference). Come learn everything we tackled together with the community over the past month, from contributions, to building new features and more.

Inside Block Open Source

Open source has always been woven into the tapestry that is Block’s engineering culture, and we’re doubling down on our commitment to it. We’ve contributed to projects like Ruby-on-Rails, MySQL, Kubernetes, created tools like Retrofit and OkHttp, co-created gRPC alongside Google, and collaborated with the community to advance open standards. And much, much more - that list is non-exhaustive. With our new Open Source Program Office (OSPO), we’re reaffirming our commitment to supporting the technologies and communities that power our systems and our innovation in a way that is inclusive, community-driven, and will outlast us.

We’re also thrilled to share our commitment to moving open source forward with the Linux Foundation’s TODO Group, which we helped co-found in 2014, where we can collaborate with and learn from Open Source Program Offices from around the world.

We recently announced Proto’s partnership with the 256 Foundation, sharing our vision to make mining tools more accessible and empower the next generation of builders.

Meet codename goose

We’ve launched a brand new open source AI agent: codename goose, which runs locally on your machine and works with your preferred LLM. goose is built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard which we co-developed with Anthropic, which enables goose to connect with the APIs and data sources in your workflow.

Our engineers are seeing a 20% increase in productivity and efficiency by using goose, and we wanted to share this tool with the broader developer community.

Download codename goose today, enjoy a quick overview on our blog, or watch our featured video below to see what goose can help you do. Let us know what you think!

Community, Flock Yeah

We can’t talk about the launch of our OSPO and goose without shining a Super Star spotlight on the incredible open source community and all the contributions we’ve received so far. Block Open Source’s Discord and events are a safe space that hopefully supports all contributions to open source, no matter how big or small. During a past livestream, Aaron Goldsmith, Infrastructure Operations Engineer at Cash App, showed a team of Goose AI agents collaborating in real time to create a website. Our community loved this so much that it inspired Cliff Hall, our featured contributor, to iterate and create a GooseTeam MCP server and collaboration protocol. Here’s what he had to say:

Thank you so much for your contribution, Cliff!

It’s Scary To Learn AI Alone, Take This

It can be tough to keep up with AI given how fast it’s changing and how waves of new terminology abruptly crash at your feet. We want to provide you with documentation, tutorials, and insightful blogs that help you understand what these new terms are and how it all matters to your every day work. Block Developer Relations lead, @angiejones, wrote this straightforward 101 guide on AI agents for those who have been hearing the term “AI agent” and want to know more about what it is, and how it works.

We Want 20-20 Video Vision

While a lot of us love blogs, it’s always been important to us that we provide helpful content for all the visual learners out there. If workshops and videos are generally more your speed, we think you will love our YouTube channel. Our channel just launched a jam-packed tutorial series called Plug & Play, a series of tutorials that teach you how you can plug in Extensions (or MCP servers) into goose and learn exactly how you can use them to automate real every day tasks. You can even follow each video along with our open source tutorials mentioned earlier.

If you learn best from being inspired by use cases, or Wild Goose Cases as we call them, you may want to check out some of our past livestream series:

• Automatically build an app from Figma Design; Highlights here - In this Goose Flight School, let’s learn to build with Hapins’ Figma MCP server together.
• Building Smarter CLIs With Codename Goose, - Explore a Wild Goose Case where Daniel Shapiro, Senior Software Engineer at Block, uses Goose to build an interactive codegen CLI to automate bootstrapping new integrations and end-to-end tests. 🤯👀
• Keep Your AI Agent and LLMs Local to Your Machine - In this Goosing Around, Parth Sareen showcases how to use Goose with Ollama, and how they work together under the hood.

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 for the next few weeks:

• Turning Tool Calls Into Phone Calls, Wild Goose Case - March 7, 2025 at 12pm ET feat. @EbonyLouis & @acekyd - New Phone, Who Dis? 📲🪿In this livestream, Paulo Taylor, Tech Evangelist, will showcase how goose connects with VOYP to turn tool based automation into real phone calls.
• Browse The Web with Tavily MCP, Goosing Around - March 11, 2025 at 1pm ET feat. @blackgirlbytes - In this livestream, we will learn more about the Tavily MCP and how you can extend Goose to search the web.

Coming.Up.Mar05.Mar18.2025.mp4

Goose IRL Meetup in Boston

On March 18 at 5:30 PM ET we're hosting our first hands-on hack night in real life! If you want to hack with codename goose, meet other enthusiasts, dive deeper into the Model Context Protocol (MCP), come build with @blackgirlbytes, @alexhancock and connect with the Goose community in person! RSVP required.

Where in the goose?!

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Thanks for reading, until next time!

• @taniacryptid, Editor
  Block Open Source