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 provides web and mobile developers with a set of easy-to-use and integrate REST APIs to manage their core backend needs.
appwrite.io
📢 Announcing The Eigth Project
After careful considerations from the committee we are thrilled to announce the eigth project:
Appwrite@appwrite
📢 Announcing the 8th OSS Fund sponsored project 📢
@grenlouis's project getleon.ai , an open-source personal assistant, is the choice of our reviewers this week 🎉
🔗 If you are looking for funds, OSS fund is still accepting applications appwrite.io/oss-fund13:00 PM - 28 Oct 2022
🤔 What Is Leon?
Leon is an open-source personal assistant who can live on your server. He does stuff when you ask him to. You can talk to him and he can talk to you. You can also text him and he can also text you. If you want to, Leon can communicate with you by being offline to protect your privacy.
Today, the most interesting part is about his core and the way he can scale up. He is pretty young but can easily scale to have new features (skills). It is said that after the official release, the community can contribute to building more skills.
🤝 Meet The Maintainer
Louis Grenard, who is a passionate developer from France and now based in China is the maintainer of Leon.
He loves building things, solving his GAN356 Air SM and truly believes in open source.
💡 How Did The Idea Of Leon Come Up?
As humans, we use services and all sorts of applications that generate data on a daily basis. But what do we actually do with this data? Can we give it a meaning and make something useful out of it instead of just letting it be stored in third-party storage? What if we build a kind of virtual brain, an abstraction that understands our human needs and translates them into our virtual actions in a seamless way, just by typing, speaking, tapping, or by doing nothing thanks to anticipation.
A virtual brain out there that acts like a bridge between our physical world and the virtual world. A virtual brain that allows us to centralise all this data in one place by connecting with all these services and applications. From your daily money transactions tracker, to your Tesla, through your weekly habits (how long you spend at the gym, at the office), etc.
We can think of any kind of “skill” scenario, without any building limit and with this train of thoughts, Leon was born.
🚘 The Journey So Far
It all started at the end of 2016 when Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO published a note and a video about his 2016 personal challenge.
A few months later Louis was on his way to attend a family event in Munich, Germany and was thinking about doing more than a simple web speech PoC - he wanted to create something that could help in my daily life. The first feature idea was to create a financial tracker, how much money he spent in restaurants in 2016
and have something that replied with a few details over voice and text.
A few weeks later Louis was thinking if Leon helps him, then it might also help others. So he decided to create a modular architecture, including one module to download videos from YouTube and save them on the device.
On the 7th of January 2018 he created Leon’s roadmap by setting up some cards such as this one and started to inform himself about open-source ecosystems. At that time, this is what Leon looked like:
March 2018, he ended up creating a teaser video and publishing it to several subreddits, such as /r/Python, /r/javascript, etc. He received tons of feedback. There was so many views on the teaser video that it exceeded the view limit on Google Drive, so he needed to quickly publish the video to YouTube. At that moment, Leon was still using the Web Speech API, so he refactored by implementing things that you know with the first release.
Fast-forward to 2022, Leon is now a massive project, with 11.3k GitHub stars, constantly being worked on and improved.
🗒️ Ending Notes
Louis says, he has been working on Leon for 5 years and it is only the beginning of a journey full of challenges and constant learning. There are many things to accomplish, and now is the time to put Leon on a faster pace.
He also says:
"Thanks Appwrite for being at the origin of such initiatives to support OSS! The software world is exponentially moving towards open source, and such initiative helps to make it more sustainable."
If this story resonates with you or your friend, tell them about OSS Fund, as applications are still open:
Appwrite OSS Fund
Appwrite provides web and mobile developers with a set of easy-to-use and integrate REST APIs to manage their core backend needs.
appwrite.io
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