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Appwrite OSS Fund Sponsors ImHex

Hi readers 👋, welcoming you back to the "Appwrite OSS Fund" series, where we celebrate open-source maintainers. 🎉

🤔 What Is OSS Fund?

On the 4th of May, the Appwrite team launched the OSS Fund, an initiative to support open-source project maintainers. Being an open-source company, we wanted to give back to the community and help as many people as we can.

The OSS Fund is an initiative that is very close to our heart.
Hear what our Founder and CEO has to say - The Appwrite Story:

Announcing the Appwrite OSS Fund - Appwrite

Appwrite is a backend-as-a-service platform that provides developers with all the core APIs required to build any application.

favicon appwrite.io

📢 Announcing The Eighteenth Project

After careful considerations from the committee we are thrilled to announce the eighteenth project:

🤔 What Is ImHex?

ImHex is a Hex Editor specifically geared towards reverse engineers, ROM hackers and programmers. At its core, ImHex lets you look at the raw bytes stored in files, loaded from a Process’s memory, from a Microcontroller’s RAM or many other sources.
Besides that though it has a powerful scripting language built-in to highlight and decode
data structures which were specifically designed for this purpose.
Summarized, it provides you with powerful data analysis tools which are often only found in expensive and proprietary tools.

🤝 Meet The Maintainer

Nik is the main maintainer and developer of ImHex amongst various other open source tools. He lives in Switzerland and work as an Embedded Electronics Engineer at the University of Applied Sciences of Bern.

💡 How Did The Idea Of ImHex Come Up?

Nik was frustrated with the current situation of Hex Editors out there. Either they were made by large companies that sold them for horrendous prices or they were made in the last century and haven’t been updated anymore since then. He was especially annoyed by the lack of proper Dark Themes in most of them.
Besides this he also really wanted to make his own Programming Language which turned out to be a perfect fit for an advanced Hex Editor like ImHex.

🚘 The Journey So Far

Nik created ImHex while he was still in University studying for his Bachelor’s degree. He originally posted it on some Discord servers and people got extremely hyped about it. Nik ended up posting it on Twitter later on which caused the whole Project to blow up over night. Within a few days the GitHub repository had over 10,000 Stars and he got emails from various people offering him support or even an internship at the ESA!

This was almost 3 years ago now. Now he is working full-time as an Embedded Software Engineer and maintain ImHex together with some friends in his free time.

🗒️ Ending Notes

As Nik continues to build ImHex for the open source community, we want to thank maintainers like him for contributing back to the community.

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