Celebrating amazing open source innovation from Ukraine

Given the ongoing dark days in Ukraine, I’d like to use this post as a chance to shine a light on some of the amazing open source projects and technological initiatives made by Ukrainian maintainers, developers and passionate tech entrepreneurs.

There are several repositories on GitHub which curate a list of Ukrainian developers, such as made-in-ukraine and awesome-ukraine, which I recommend consulting for a comprehensive compilation of work. In this article, I wanted to highlight a subset of these projects, some of which I am using or am familiar with, but hadn’t realized their creators are Ukrainian developers.

Skill up on JavaScript algorithms and data structures

Oleksii Trekhleb, whom you can follow on Twitter at @Trekhleb, created a repository for algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript with explanations and links to further readings.

If you’re a Python developer, you’d be happy to know that Oleksii has also created a playground and cheat sheet for learning Python development as a GitHub open source project.

Build beautiful React applications for the command line

I am a command line enthusiast myself and so I have a special place in my heart for the open source JavaScript project Ink. It’s creator, Vadim Demedes, who you can find on Twitter at @vadimdemedes, built Ink to allow developers to build CLI applications with the power of React.

Essentially, if you know React and JavaScript, you can build beautiful applications for the command line with this framework. It has a great set of plugins and a community that helps extend it and provide different sorts of user interactivity.

Do developers like to use beautiful terminal user interfaces?

Of course they do! Meet Denys Dovhan, who builds Spaceship prompt, which if you’re a fan of using the command line interface, and also happen to be using ZSH (the Z shell), then you probably want to step up your game with Deny’s project which enhances your command line prompt!

You’re using npm and yarn, but did you hear about pnpm?

If you’re a JavaScript developer, you are certainly using npm on a regular basis to manage your project’s open source dependencies or just to fire up npm run scripts. There are alternatives, though, to the popular npm package manager.

One of them that you may have not heard of it, or haven’t used yet, is pnpm. Built by Ukrainian developer Zoltan Kochan, pnpm describes itself as a fast, disk space efficient package manager  — and it doesn’t fail to live up to its expectations.

You’ll see projects from Microsoft, and all the way to Vue.js, Verdaccio, and others that are prominent users of pnpm for its stability, speed, and great support for managing source code monorepos.

Ukrainian developer helps power the JavaScript ecosystem

While we’re on the JavaScript bandwagon talking about pnpm and package managers, let’s also call out Paul Miller’s popular npm package Chokidar, which may sounds like a Pokemon character, but is a pivotal project in the JavaScript ecosystem. It’s a cross-platform file watching library that is used by the likes of Webpack, the well-loved VS Code IDE, and others.

Great job, Paul!

How do you build mobile-friendly interactive maps with JavaScript?

One more on the JavaScript side of things! Meet Vladimir Agafonkin, the author of the Leaflet open source project. The project is an optimized mobile JavaScript library, so a small footprint and optimal performance is expected.

The GitHub project repository has well over 30,000 stars on GitHub and the Leaflet library is used extensively across the web to help developers build interactive map visualizations, pinned maps locations, build map interactions, and more.

Is WebAssembly the future of the web?

Meet open source developer Volodymyr Shymanskyy, who maintains wasm3, which is dubbed the fastest WebAssembly interpreter, and the most universal runtime.

Is WebAssembly the future of the web? At least one Volodymyr believes it is, and he went off to build the open source project wasm3.

Contributing to Ansible to build DevOps tools that automate systems deployments

If you haven’t heard about it before, Ansible is a radically simple DevOps and IT automation platform that, by employing infrastructure as code methodology, makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain.

Sviatoslav Sydorenko, a Ukrainian developer, is a core member of the Ansible open source project. While Sviatoslav isn’t currently active on the project, he contributed to its success early on.

Awesome startups, technology, and open source in Ukraine

We’ve reviewed just a shortlist of developers focused on open source projects, but the open source and tech community in Ukraine is large and thriving.

I owe a big thanks to ChernivtsiJS, a JavaScript community from Chernivtsi, Ukraine  which maintains the made-in-ukraine GitHub repository of curated information, tracking all of these amazing Ukrainian developers and everything they are up to.

And also a big shout out to Artem Yavorsky, who maintains the GitHub repository at awesome-ukraine, with a lot of information about local IT, communities, meetups, and other amazing tech that’s being built in Ukraine.

How to help Ukraine in the current crisis it is facing

The above mentioned developers recommended the following ways to help and support Ukraine right now:

1. Come Back Alive

2. Ukraine’s Red Cross

3. For More information about how you can support Ukraine right now from your own country, head to the How to Help Ukraine Now wiki.

Snyk also joined the cause and donated $100,000 USD to United Help Ukraine, as well as helping open source developers to secure their projects by doubling the free test limits that Snyk provides to maintainers and developers.