Ask HN: What open source project is your pride and joy?

27 points by seamusabshere ↗ HN
Maybe you've authored or contributed to 10 projects - which one is special?

34 comments

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I'll bite. I wrote a a parsing library for python on top of PLY, that provides many high-level features such as EBNF syntax and automatic AST creation, and the trees a query-able with CSS-like syntax.

It's on github and I get immense joy for every little star it gets (https://github.com/erezsh/plyplus)

I'm writing an open curriculum for learning Python, aimed at people who have never programmed before. The student-facing page is at http://introtopython.org, and the project page is at https://github.com/ehmatthes/intro_programming.

I started revising the curriculum for a class I teach each fall, and then realized I could just as easily turn it into an open resource. Now even though the class is over, I can't stop working on it. If anyone is interested, I'd love to have some professional eyes on some of the code samples, and I'd love some help writing exercises and challenges.

It's still a young project, but I'm happy to hear feedback.

libHN and my HackerNews client for iOS.

- libHN: https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN

- News/YC: https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone

I love contributing to this community, but the website on mobile is not great at all. I love using Alien Blue for Reddit, so I decided to make a beautiful app to read and contribute to the community for iPhone. I started with just the reader - to view links and comments. However, just recently I made libHN as a wrapper of HackerNews API calls and then the app now uses that to be a portal to HackerNews. The app is an absolute joy to use now, if I may so myself!

Right now, it's gotten about 3,000+ downloads from the App Store. I don't track anything, so no idea on daily users. I just launched the pro version with the ability to login/vote/reply/submit for $0.99 two days ago. However, you can build from source and get it from free ;)

https://bip.io (Billion Instructions per I/O) - its a framework for creating ephemeral endpoints ontop of graph based message pipelines. You can orchestrate and share these graphs (kind of like micro-workflows) to automate tasks, serve content, run an app... that sort of thing. I love it, even if no-one 'gets it' and has zero traction, working in this problem space is very satisfying and always a challenge :) albeit it sometimes overwhelmingly complex
This project helped me learn python, and ultimately ended up getting a job with python, I think that this project and the people who motivated me to build this, made me the python developer I am today :).

https://github.com/LuRsT/Pendium

"locally grown" GPL'd scripts (general utils); most bash, some perl; bash function library

Want to share these simple, general utilities, handy tools, or convenience wrappers - most bash, some perl. Categories: script-infrastructure libraries, text filtering, log creation/parsing, simple network-related, regex, time, mail, cygwin, latex, jobs, processes, pathname, file or file-archive related, m4, make, system, and backup:

Been writing shell scripts since late 80s, still humble, and learning; appreciate constructive code review.

http://TRodman.com/scripts (~400k tarball w/installer)

--

Tom

Linux/devops scripting admin for HIRE; resume/skill assessment: http://TRodman.com

I'm currently developing one to scratch my own itch. I had a problem of sharing data between embedded devices. My search for a solution led me to find out that there was no simple API to simply interchange data between devices. Less so in an Open Source variant. So I wrote a tiny Django based API that allows embedded devices share data through HTTP calls.

What is this good for?

Say you have a RaspberryPi-based weather station with internet access. With one API call your an share your data (raw or processed) with any other device. Since its open source, you can run your own little closed network. Imagine having hundreds of mini weather stations sharing data over the web like this.

It works for any device that has access to the internet. Even if its through a host connection (If you have an Arduino connected to a laptop through serial. It can make the HTTP calls through a client script/library I'm including, too.)

Here is the github repo: https://github.com/bliti/bbedy

The program runs locally, but has not been setup for deployment. I have not written the documentation for it. Should be up and running by December 2013.

https://github.com/LPology/Simple-Ajax-Uploader - A Javascript plugin for cross-browser ajax file uploading.

A lot of my users are still running IE7/IE8, so I've spent a great deal of time researching and tinkering over the past two years to try to achieve a uniform experience in older browsers, even with modern features like progress bars and multiple uploads.

My own tool that I built to scratch my own itch. PGXplorer (pgxplorer.com). I threw in features that I couldn't find in PGAdmin3 (grouping, easy filter, windowing, pivoting). I use both these tool in tandem.
https://github.com/brotchie/Parcoa

Parser combinators for Objective-C.

I wrote this ~10-11 months ago because there were no internal-DSL based parser combinators available for Objective-C. I'm not sure if the landscape has changed since then!

Performance-wise the resulting parsers are SLOOOOW. I have created a branch that uses ranges instead of immutable strings, but have yet to merge it with master.

I originally designed it as a replacement parser for NUI (https://github.com/tombenner/nui) but the performance wasn't up to scratch compared with NUI's tailored regular expression based parser.

A console-based mail-client with Lua scripting. It isn't the most popular project I've ever created, but it is damn useful to me and surprisingly powerful:

http://lumail.org/

My runner-up project would be the host automation tool, written in Perl, Slaughter:

http://steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/

(That will eventually move to slaughter.io.)