TL;DR
It's been less than two weeks since my last article, and I've already prepared 8 open source tools that every developer should know.
Their knowledge will help in various programming situations that arise both in business and in personal projects.
And, as usual, if you have an interesting project worth adding to the project, we'd love to hear about it in the comments!
1. 💎 Hmpl-js - Fetch HTML, render it safely, and keep apps dynamic, modern, and small
Let's start with a small template language that will allow you to create a design on the server and then transfer it to the client on any domain.
HMPL.js provides the flexibility to build server-driven templates with minimal JavaScript.
🔍 View the hmpl-js repository ☆
2. ⚙️ GitMCP - free, open-source, remote MCP server for any GitHub project
The following project is a server implementing the MCP protocol that connects LLM directly to a GitHub repository.
GitMCP is a free, open-source, remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that transforms any GitHub project (repositories or GitHub pages) into a documentation hub.
🔍 View the GitMCP repository ☆
3. 📁 Linux kernel - Linux kernel source tree
Now let's look at something truly colossal. The next project needs no introduction, but if anyone doesn't know, it's the kernel of the Linux operating system, which you may be using to view this article.
The Linux kernel is the core of any Linux operating system. It manages hardware,
system resources, and provides the fundamental services for all other software.
🔍 View the Linux kernel repository ☆
4. 🗄️ Redis - Preferred, fastest, and most feature-rich cache, data structure server, and document and vector query engine.
If you need a fast response from your database, this system is 100% suitable.
non-relational NoSQL database management system
5. 🗒 Readme.so - An online drag-and-drop editor to easily build READMEs
This handy README editor. If you're just starting out, this is a really good place to start.
Readme.so is an online editor to help developers make readmes for their project.
🔍 View the Readme.so repository ☆
6. 🧩 Shadcn UI - A set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform
Next on the list is a bundle of components that will help you create a modern design in just a couple of minutes. Most startups use this library as the main one for their design.
Accessible and customizable components that you can copy and paste into your apps. Free. Open Source. Use this to build your own component library.
🔍 View the Shadcn repository ☆
7. 🖥️ Tweakcn - A visual no-code theme editor for shadcn/ui components
Create custom themes for your apps in a visual editor. An AI module is included in the project, making theme generation easier and faster.
tweakcn is a powerful Visual Theme Editor for tailwind CSS & shadcn/ui components. It comes with Beautiful theme presets to get started, while aiming to offer advanced customisation for each aspect of your UI
🔍 View the Tweakcn repository ☆
8. 🔗 LangChain - Build context-aware reasoning applications
This is probably one of the fastest growing projects on GitHub, as the industry was simply blown away by the release of ChatGPT and this project combined the concepts of framework and AI prompt_template.invoke().
LangChain is a framework for building LLM-powered applications. It helps you chain together interoperable components and third-party integrations to simplify AI application development — all while future-proofing decisions as the underlying technology evolves.
🔍 View the LangChain repository ☆
9. ▲ Turborepo - Build system optimized for JavaScript and TypeScript, written in Rust
Created by the same folks behind Vercel and Next.js, Turborepo is a high-speed build system that’s especially useful for monorepos.
Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases, written in Rust.
🔍 View the Turborepo repository ☆
10. 🐇 Bun - Fast JavaScript package manager
Bun was recently acquired by Anthropic, which provides insight into the future development of this module within the modern AI space.
Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript runtime & toolkit designed for speed, complete with a bundler, test runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager. Bun aims for 100% Node.js compatibility.
11. 👾 Godot - Free and open source 2D and 3D game engine
A truly legendary engine like Unity or Unreal Engine for games. If you are a game developer, you should know this project. From pet projects for the university to multi-million dollar games - it gives it all.
Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel.
12. 🗄️ Nx - Build system, optimized for monorepos, with AI-powered architectural awareness and advanced CI capabilities
If you are too lazy to create 10 different projects on GitLab, but want one, but to do it normally, then Nx is a good solution. It happens that when you do something in a small team or even alone, there is simply no strength to develop everything within the CI/CD framework, or there is no budget for DevOps to solve all these problems, this option is just right.
Nx Cloud connects directly to your existing CI setup, helping you scale your monorepos on CI by leveraging remote caching, task distribution across multiple machines, automated e2e test splitting and automated task flakiness detection
13. 🪨 Medusa - The world's most flexible commerce platform
If you are familiar with WordPress, when you did something on a freelance platform for a couple of hundred dollars, say, a vacuum cleaner store and used WooCommerce, then this platform will seem familiar to you. Only, with one condition - it is all tricked out and with modern capabilities of the SaaS platform.
Medusa is an ecommerce platform with a built-in framework for customization that allows you to build custom commerce applications without reinventing core commerce logic. The framework and modules can be used to build advanced B2B or DTC ecommerce stores, marketplaces, PoS systems, service businesses, or any product that needs foundational commerce primitives. All commerce modules are open-source and freely available on npm.
🔍 View the Medusa repository ☆
✅ Conclusion
Knowledge of each new project allows you to most clearly understand the full depth of the problem, and, most importantly, understanding this will save a lot of time. In this article, I tried to give the most common projects for AI, backend and much more.
I hope you learned something new.
Top comments (3)
Good list, but Linux doesn't seem to be quite the tool.
Thank you! Linux is the ultimate tool.
How do you like the list?