haimantika mitra for Appwrite

Posted on Jul 18, 2022 • Updated on Jul 26, 2022

Appwrite OSS Fund Sponsors Oh My Posh

Hi readers 👋, welcoming you back to the "Appwrite OSS Fund" series, where we celebrate open-source maintainers. 🎉

🤔 What Is OSS Fund?

On the 4th of May, the Appwrite team launched the OSS Fund, an initiative to support open-source project maintainers. Being an open-source company, we wanted to give back to the community and help as many people as we can.

The OSS Fund is an initiative that is very close to our heart.
Hear what our Founder and CEO has to say - The Appwrite Story:

Announcing the Appwrite OSS Fund - Appwrite

Appwrite provides web and mobile developers with a set of easy-to-use and integrate REST APIs to manage their core backend needs.

appwrite.io

📢 Announcing The Second Project

After careful considerations from the committee we are thrilled to announce the second project:

Appwrite

@appwrite

📢 Excited to announce @jandedobbeleer as the second maintainer we're sponsoring via the OSS Fund!

We're happy to support projects like oh-my-posh 🥳

🔗 Applications for the OSS Fund are still open, do share with your maintainer friends: appwrite.io/oss-fund

16:32 PM - 05 Jul 2022

🤔 What Is Oh My Posh?

Oh My Posh is a cross shell/platform prompt theme utility. Did you ever notice other people's terminals and wonder how they got that cool looking prompt? Well, Oh My Posh is one of the tools out there offering just that, without needing to know the nitty gritty details of how your shell works. All you need to do is read the docs, copy paste a one-liner in your shell's profile and you're good to go. Afterwards there's a lot more you can tweak to make it really "your own", but the aim is to make having a great developer (or terminal) experience accessible to anyone, regardless of their background and skill set.

🤝 Meet The Maintainer

The person behind Oh My Posh is, Jan De Dobbeleer, a 40 year old dad (he/him), and a software engineer, living in Diest, Belgium.

During office hours he is an Engineering Manager at NIKE where he coaches 2 teams, after hours he is an open sourcerer hacking away on a tool called oh-my-posh and helping others understand how they can be successful by learning what open source offers in terms of mindset and ways of working (think developer workflows, CI/CD, continuous deployment). All of this has made him a Microsoft MVP, GitHub Star and GitKraken ambassador.

Apart from that, he runs, swims and have been inline skating since the 90's, also plays games and collects interesting sneakers.

Jan says : "Next to that I also make mistakes, learn and adjust. You know, fall, get up and try again."

💡 How Did The Idea Of Oh My Posh Come Up?

Back in 2015 Jan was working at a company where he had a lot of Linux users. As he was the only software engineer working on Windows at the time due to the rise of Windows Phone, some of them started making fun of that, specifically the developer experience. Jan says, he is not someone who simply takes that and leaves it, he turned it into a mission to prove them wrong. He wanted to show that one could have an experience centered around the terminal on Windows that's at least equal to what they had on Linux/macOS. This is how Oh My Posh started.

🚘 The Journey So Far

To build Oh My Posh, Jan started out learning what it took to move from UI to CLI, not just for shell scripts but also building Windows Phone apps, deploying to the store and everything one would nowadays expect, having a devops mindset, and eventually transitioned to make the shell as beautiful as theirs.

He started looking at how to customize prompts in PowerShell and he originally set out to create an agnoster style prompt. That goal was achieved rather fast and the first ever version was also called PS-Agnoster, which quickly turned into Oh My Posh as he set out to create an Oh My ZSH like experience for PowerShell. A few iterations later he realized that this wasn't really what people were looking for so he focused fulltime on the prompt theming part which is when things really took off.

A few job positions later, Jan was no longer working on a Windows machine but on a Macbook pro, that's when I came to the realization that he wanted to have that same prompt experience everywhere, not just PowerShell. The options out there were limited in either functionality or use case so once again he found a mission, took all the learning from building Oh My Posh the past 3 years and went back to the drawing board.

Roughly one year later he was able to flight a beta to get feedback, and that's when things took off for a second time. It's now more feature rich than ever with new functionality being added weekly and it doesn't seem to stop. He always did it for himself, but now he is focusing on helping others get their use cases in, trying to build the best prompt experience out there.

🗒️ Ending Notes

Jan wants to thank Appwrite and everyone else who donated to the project, whether that's via sponsoring, contributions of sharing thoughts/ideas.

If this story resonates with you or your friend, tell them about OSS Fund, as applications are still open: