Star History Monthly Pick | May 2023

This month's collection didn't start with a specific topic in mind, but looking back it seems they are not your usual hardcore GitHub projects for developers, but rather, can also be used by non-tech (or not-so tech-savy) people. Call me biased, but as a non-developer myself, it's always nice to find inspiring projects that I can get started with to make my life easier.

Windmill

Windmill can be seen as an open-source alternative to Airplane or a low-code alternative to Temporal. You can convert your scripts into internal workflows or applications quickly with Windmill. As a low-code tool, its users can range from those with little coding experience to developers.

Windmill Hub is a place where users share script templates that others can reuse. This is golden for those looking for specific solutions and should also help with SEO and conversion rates (Having users generate and share templates is key to Notion's success).

Apparently, a user submitted Windmill to HN a month ago, which is also reflected in their star history (will you look at that spike).

Formbricks

I was actually researching Prisma use cases when I came across Formbricks, a survey tool and open-source alternative to Typeform. It is originally called snoopForms when they first launched back in 2022. They attribute their success to:

• Open-source: data security, customizable, no vendor lock-in
• Low-code: accessible to both developers and non-tech people
• And its value: it's all about the when, how and where to ask the questions so as to obtain accurate insights from users. These tasks are often completed by product managers who may not be developers themselves. As a low-code tool, the ability to embed surveys directly into products without needing to modify application code and bother developers repeatedly surely is music to the ears.

Easy Email

Easy Email is a drag-and-drop email editor developed based on the poplular framework for responsive-email: MJML. It's open-sourced by Zalify, a data-driven growth platform for Shopify merchants and it looks like Easy Email is a Zalify add-on.

BTW - is it just me or is their logo Gmail's cousin? 🤣

DB-GPT

After the initial hype of having Large Language Models change our lives completely, we start to realize that this also poses challenges to our data security and privacy. DB-GPT is a tool which allows for the deployment of LLMs locally, and you can connect DB-GPT to private databases.

The feature list already includes Chat2sql, executing and polishing SQL, processing data, storing and indexing vectors, and managing LLMs.

Of course, you can use it alongside Bytebase.

SeaORM

SeaORM is an asynchronous dynamic Rust ORM that provides a simple way to operate SQL databases.

SeaORM's organization is called SeaQL (bonus points for the pun), and all of their projects are named after the sea and database-related. For example, SeaQuery is the foundation of SeaORM, a dynamic SQL query builder that works with MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite.

To Sum Up

All of these projects are so different and have completely different origin stories, and even their Star History trends, but isn't that what's fascinating?! And, if you come across any interesting tools, make sure to let us know @StarHistoryHQ! 👻