Last week, I shared five of my favourite open source projects in celebration of Maintainer Week. I promised this week I'd share five more. So here's five I use every week. I love them, and many of them you might not even realise are open source!

#MaintainerWeek: five open source projects to celebrate and appreciate

Michelle Mannering Jun 11 3 min read

#githunt

VS Code

Yep, Microsoft's VS Code is open source. It's one of the largest open source repos out there. Thousands of people contribute to this code base, and it's available to the community completely for free.

It's my favourite code editor with hundreds of plug-ins. One of the best things about VS Code is its collaboration mode. You can have colleagues jump in and help you debug, or have a guest join you on a Twitch stream for some pair programming.

00:59

Chatbot integration for Twitch and GitHub is almost ready Pair programming

Michelle Mannering Mar 1 3 min read

#github #twitch #webdev #javascript

Android

A lot of people often forget Android: the open source mobile operating system based on Linux. As a Samsung fan-girl with more than one Samsung phone I'm using Android every day. I've played around with the dev settings, flashed devices, and added some of my own software on top.

It's great for testing mobile apps and has so much more functionality than any other mobile OS's out there. If I ever got stuck with a non-Android phone, I'd be trying to flash Android onto it... somehow!

Ubuntu

Speaking of Linux; you can't really talk about Linux without talking about Ubuntu. It's the Linux distribution based on Debian. As a GitHub Actions user, Ubuntu often comes up in my daily usage.

I also heavily use Ubuntu when fixing PCs: just stick Ubuntu onto a bootable USB, boot into Ubuntu, grab all the files from the hard drive, wipe the PC, and start again. It's the perfect way to fix my mate's computers when they somehow manage to crash and burn their system. Jokes aside, Ubuntu is super powerful, and can do a lot.

Twitch Leecher

As someone who often appears on other people's Twitch streams as a guest, how do I get a copy of the stream, short of asking the host? That's where Twitch Leecher comes in. You can search for any channel or copy and paste the URL to download your Twitch video.

It's also super handy if you need to export all your Twitch videos in one go. The downloads manager is really easy to use and the interface is simple, yet effective.

Nicehash Miner

As more people get into GPU mining, it's good to have an awesome to-go miner. Nicehash Miner is the perfect GPU miner that manages the highest hashrates and does so all automatically. It auto tunes for best performance and efficiency, and even switches to the best crypto algorithm at the time.

Make sure you're using a good throttling tool to manage your hardware and ensure you don't overheat your devices. Nicehash Miner will do everything else for you. You can select to mine with your CPU or GPU depending on which will get you the best outcomes.

Open source projects

There you have it. Five open source projects I am constantly using. What projects are you using in your daily work? Did you thank any maintainers during Maintainer Week?