I will be forever grateful for the tonne of amazing open source software that is made available to us, and can barely even imagine where my projects/career would be without it.
While I’d like to be more active in this space than I currently am, there are three open source projects that I’ve made significant(ish) and ongoing contributions to over the years:
StimulusReflex. StimulusReflex (SR) provides something similar to the Hotwire magic that was introduced with Rails 7, only SR has been doing it for a lot longer. It was the first Ruby library (to my knowledge, at least) exclusively geared towards building reactive, realtime apps in Rails. My contributions have mostly revolved around reflex callbacks based on certain lifecycle events.
CableReady. Closely related to StimulusReflex, CableReady provides a simple protocol for delivering server-rendered HTML over websockets. You often hear it referred to as the secret sauce that powers SR, as it makes realtime updates delightfully easy to work with in Rails. I’ve made a range of contributions to the project over the years, the majority of which relate to logic connecting lifecycle events in Rails models to web socket broadcasts.
WeasyPrint. WeasyPrint is a python library that converts HTML pages into snazzy PDF documents. We use the library at Code & Co., and I’ve worked closely with its creators to help bring some of its features to life – most recently the addition of footnote support in line with the W3C protocol.