In this talk, I'll be launching and going over my journey of building a project called Vyaakaran which started over 2 years ago. Vyaakaran is a one-of-a-kind tool to create, visualize, and test formal grammars and automata. It is something I started building in my college to make it more practical to learn and also get a taste of how languages are designed. Other students have also been using it to learn this subject for the past few months. I’ll also be sharing what I’ve learnt while working on this tool with a theme around FOSS and building things that seem challenging.

The talk will cover:

1. When / Why I started building Vyaakaran.
2. About Vyaakaran:
3. Quick demo of the tool and its features.
4. Internals of the compiler and the web-based editor.
5. Open-source technologies it uses.
6. How students from my university came together to add a new feature to the project.
7. Covering things I learnt along the way:
8. Why I find learning things practically is the best way to learn.
9. Why DSLs are practical and fun to work on!
10. Why more people should build things that seem challenging.
11. A project is not just code, it’s the passion of the developer behind it to see it come alive.
12. How Vyaakaran accidentally became a language to design other languages!
13. Why I initially decided to not make it Open Source.
14. Making Vyaakaran open source on stage 🎉