Highlights: Conservancy's Recent Free Software Development
by on June 26, 2018
Conservancy helps our projects in so many ways, but one of the most exciting and direct ways is that we directly fund software development and other work for our member projects. We look forward to keeping our community regularly updated on the work we fund, since it's a great way to learn about milestones in communities that you might not follow regularly.
Clojars
We helped Clojars set up a grant program Clojurists Together to help the community identify and fund critical Clojars development including code, infrastructure fixes and documentation.
Clojars is a community repo of free software Clojure libraries. One of the most popular projects is Bruce Hauman's Figwheel tool. Figwheel allows developers to write reloadable code that compiles instantaneously to Javascript while you work. You can learn a little bit more about why he built Figwheel on his blog. But basically, you can use a Lisp dialect to make great looking websites without ever stopping to compile - win-win!
Lee Hinman worked on updating the API and other features for clj-http, a widely used base HTTP client. You can check out the code for yourself if you like!
Godot
In the GDNative world, Thomas Herzog made lots of progress on 3D rendering and environmental reflections, both of which are key for an immersive game world. Next up, he's planning some more work on sky texture and the C++ bindings for the Godot Engine.
Juan Linietsy implemented support for CSG ("Constructive Solid Geometry") in the Godot Engine. In games, 3D work can be extremely time-consuming and is often out-sourced. CSG allows game designers to build simple environments they can use to visualize game play on their own. Read Juan's whole post to see some sample shapes and learn more about how it all works under the hood.
Rémi Verschelde also spent time getting Godot (and it's code base) ready for this year's Google Summer of Code interns and promoting the project locally at a Danish gaming event. You can see here that he also made Godot's documentation ready for translation. He was even inspired by (fellow Conservancy member!) PHPmyAdmin to script a way to gather all the templates together into one monolithic file.
PHPmyAdmin
Michal Čihař has been spending time looking at how to make Docker work for PHPy Admin and tidying up the website. Meanwhile, Maurício Meneghini Fauth spent his time making way for the switch to PHP 7.1 b y removing some dependencies, doing lots of refactoring and pulling out PHP 5 code. phpMyAdmin has been around for nineteen years, so we're really glad to see them keeping pace with current tech in order to serve the next generation of web administrators!
If you saw something excting here, we encourage you to get involved in these projects. Nearly every free software project could use your help with translation, testing, documentation or something. You can also donate directly to our member projects or Conservancy, if that's more your style. Thanks for supporting free software!
Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.
