Projects
Over the last couple of years I created and contributed to a number of
Open Source projects. Most of them were Python and Rust, a couple of
others however were also C, C++, JavaScript, PHP or other languages mixed
in.
This list is widely incomplete, lots of small things can be found on my
GitHub profile and some things are lost
in the depths of the internet.
Commercial Endeavors
Some of the more meaningful commercial projects and initiatives I worked on:
- Plurk — the first commercial project I
worked on. A microblogging platform similar to Twitter with a unieuq
timelime.
- Fireline — online services platform for games.
Built by a subsidary of Splash Damage to support internal and external
games.
- Sentry — error tracking and performance
monitoring platform. Initially Open Source, now Fair Source. There since we raised money, built out an
office in Austria and lead SDKs and ingestion services for a many
years.
- Functional Software License — I was part
of drafting and promoting Sentry's DOSP springing
license. An innovative license that comes with a two year exclusivity
period for the original creator which turns into Apache2/MIT
afterwards.
- Fair Source — the branding term we have
promoted for FSL style licenses with minimal restrictions that undergo
DOSP.
- Open Source Pledge — an initiative
born at Sentry to encourage companies to pledge to their Open Source
dependencies.
Open Source Libraries
This is a selection of some of my more popular Open Source libraries and
projects. They either became popular on their own, or gave birth to other
Open Source projects later:
- Flask — a microframework for
Python based on good intentions. At the time it became one of the
most popular Python frameworks and has been adopted by many companies
for internal APIs and microservices.
- Pygments — syntax highlighter written in
Python. I created this project together with Georg Brandl in 2005.
For a while it became a very popular syntax highlighting powering many
web sites, including GitHub.
- Jinja — template engine for
Python. Originally built as an improved version of Django templates
for non Django frameworks. It became popular through Flask and other
web frameworks and also found home as a template language for
infrastructure scripting (salt and ansible) as well as LLM prompting.
- Sphinx — a Python documentation tool.
Like Pygments this was built together with Georg Brandl, oringally as
a replacement for the old LaTeX based documentation for Python itself.
It later became popular as a solution to write books and
documentations for many projects.
- Werkzeug — WSGI utility library for Python.
This was originally built to promote the use of WSGI for Python and to
build applications on top. Later this became the based of Flask.
- Click — a
command line interface utility library. I built this to make it
easier to build command line applications and it has become a very
popular choice in the Python ecosystem.
- Rye — an experimental package
manager for Python. Built for my own use to see what packaging in
Python could look like it attracted a lot of interest. The project
has been donated to astral who are building uv as a better,
spiritual successor.
- Twig — a Django-inspired template
engine for PHP. Originally created for a blogging system called
Chyrp, it took a life on its own when it was taken over by the
Symfony project.
- Babel — collection of tools for
internationalizing Python applications. Originally built by Edgewall
software for trac, I maintained it for a while.
- Logbook — a logging library for Python.
- itsdangerous — a
cryptographic signing library used by Flask and many other libraries.
- redis-rs — a redis driver
for Rust. Originally built to learn Rust, it has become the most
popular redis driver.
- insta — a snapshot testing library for Rust.
Originally built for use at Sentry it has been adopted quite widely
for an improved snapshot testing experience.
- similar — a diffling library for Rust.
Originally used for insta, has been independently become widely used.
- minijinja — a minimal dependency
implementation of Jinja2 for Rust. Built for my own use for an
unreleased project, it has also been adopted by a number of projects
and companies for LLM prompting.
Open Source Applications
- Zine — a
blog software written in Python. This has been lost in the archive of the
internet, but at the time I was very proud of it. It was a blogging
platform similar to WordPress for Python. (archive)
- Plurk Solace — a multilingual
support application. Was not used much but it was my first Open
Source project I was paid for. (archive)
- python-modernize — Python 2 to 3
porting tool. I build this to demonstrate that you can build code
bases that were compatible to both 2.x and 3.x. It later gave life to
modernize.
- pipsi — a wrapper around pip
for script installation that later inspired pipx and things like uv
run.
- Lektor — a static file content
management system written in Python.
Computer Games
In a prior life I was credited for my work on some computer games:
Projects for Competitions
- “Be a Bee” — for
u19, Ars Electronica 2003. 2nd Place. In some ways what got me more
excited about programming and creating things.