Discover projects

Open-source projects looking for their next chapter.

Plume

Serverless Postgres branching for preview environments

Abandoned

Plume creates a branched copy of your Postgres database per preview deployment. Like Git branches but for data. Used in 4 production setups I know of. I built it because Neon's branching was expensive and Supabase didn't have it. The interesting engineering was the copy-on-write at the table level. I'm leaving because the company I built this for is shutting down and the use case at my new job doesn't need it.

#rust#postgresql#docker#aws
6mo ago
Adopt →

Quill

A markdown editor with real-time collaboration, no Electron

Abandoned

Quill is a browser-based markdown editor with Yjs-powered collaboration. I built it because none of the existing ones (StackEdit, Dillinger, HackMD) felt right. Quill is fast, the toolbar adapts to the cursor position, and the export to MD/HTML/PDF is clean. I got bored of the CSS. The architecture is sound. The biggest issue is no mobile support — I never figured out how to make a good mobile markdown editor.

#typescript#react#nodejs#websocket
6mo ago
Adopt →

Lumen

Zero-config GraphQL backend for Postgres, with auth and realtime

Abandoned

Built Lumen over 14 months while freelancing. The idea was: drop a schema, get a production GraphQL API with auth, subscriptions, row-level security — no glue code. Got to ~600 stars, a few production users, and an OKR of "hit 1k stars then find a co-maintainer." I never hit the OKR. I took a full-time role in November, and after two months of trying to maintain it on nights and weekends, I let it go. The codebase is solid, the docs are good, the test suite is honest. Someone who wanted to go full indie on it would have a real head start.

#typescript#postgresql#graphql#nodejs +3
7mo ago
Adopt →

Cobalt

Real-time collaborative canvas with offline support

Abandoned

Cobalt is a Figma-lite built on Yjs. I built it to teach myself CRDTs. The interesting part was the performance budget — we hit 60fps on 5k objects per user, 8 concurrent users, on a M1. The codebase is small (~8k lines of TS) and the test suite is the best I've ever written. I'm not using it, my co-author is at a startup that acquired it, and we're looking for someone to take it from here.

#typescript#react#nodejs#websocket +1
10mo ago
Adopt →

Vessel

Container-native task scheduler with cron + DAGs

Abandoned

Vessel schedules containerized tasks with cron syntax and DAG dependencies. Used to power my side project's data pipeline. I built it because AWS Batch was overkill and Airflow was too much. I'm leaving because I don't run side projects with data pipelines anymore. The scheduler works, the queue is solid, the UI is functional. The Docker socket handling is the part I'm most proud of.

#go#docker#postgresql#redis +2
1y ago
Adopt →

Lattice

Type-safe i18n for TypeScript with zero runtime overhead

Abandoned

Lattice generates JSON dictionaries + a strongly-typed accessor from a single source of truth. Zero runtime. Zero dependencies. Tree-shakable. Used in production at three different startups I know of. I built it for my own freelance work and the README is what I'm proudest of. The tool is small (under 1k lines) but the docs are 50 pages. I'm leaving it because I joined a company that uses a different i18n solution and I can't ethically maintain both.

#typescript#nodejs#react#vue +1
1y ago
Adopt →

Tessera

Vector tile server for OpenStreetMap with custom style support

Abandoned

Tessera serves MBTiles files as vector tiles with custom Mapbox GL styles. Used it to build a hiking maps site for a national park. The interesting bit was the style compiler that takes a JSON style spec and emits optimized PMTiles. I'm leaving the maintainer role because the OSM ecosystem has moved on to PMTiles and the project would need a rewrite to stay current.

#python#postgresql#docker#tailwind
1y ago
Adopt →

Pinnacle

Headless commerce for indie devs who hate Shopify

Abandoned

Pinnacle is what I wanted Shopify to be when I was running a tiny t-shirt shop. Clean API, no theme lock-in, supports weird product types. Got to 40 paying customers, then realized I'd built myself a second job. Sold the customer list to a friend with a Shopify store (with their consent) and walked away. The code is well-organized. The docs are okay. The pricing model is wrong — I made it too cheap.

#typescript#nodejs#react#nextjs +3
1y ago
Adopt →

Driftwood

A markdown blog framework for hackers. No JS, just files.

Abandoned

Driftwood was my weekend project for two years. It served my own blog for 18 months. It does exactly one thing: turns a folder of .md files into a static site. Has RSS, has tags, has a theme system. Doesn't have a build step. Doesn't have a config file. Just runs. It taught me a lot about Go templates. I don't blog publicly anymore (moved to paper journals), so it has no user. Would love to see it find one.

#go#tailwind
2y ago
Adopt →