Getting Rid of Dust / 1.0.0-beta.4

1. Leon

   1 39 15,724 9.4 TypeScript

   🧠 Leon is your open-source personal assistant.

   

   Today, we'll focus on the new release of Leon and understand what's new, where the project is leading to and the thinking process behind some decisions.

2. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

   SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

   

3. module-alias

   2 2 1,763 1.5 JavaScript

   Register aliases of directories and custom module paths in Node

   

   But here is the thing, I want to continue to use the module-alias npm package as I find it brings better readability of the imports. I found that it requires to build a custom module loader to resolve it. I concluded that it was too much steps to achieve for a small output, then I chose to postpone the Babel dropping task. If you are interested into that specific case, there is an ongoing GitHub issue.

4. snowboy

   3 6 3,133 0.0 C++

   Future versions with model training module will be maintained through a forked version here: https://github.com/seasalt-ai/snowboy

   

   Leon uses Snowboy for its hotword detection. Unfortunately the project has been discontinued and is suffering from the lack of maintainability.

5. node-pre-gyp

   4 4 1,121 8.1 JavaScript

   Node.js tool for easy binary deployment of C++ addons

   

   Indeed, Snowboy uses node-pre-gyp which helps to publish and install Node.js C++ addons from binaries. So when a new Node.js version is shipped, node-pre-gyp must update its listing of the supported targets by specifying the:

6. snowboy

   5 1 0 0.0 C++

   Future versions with model training module will be maintained through a forked version here: https://github.com/seasalt-ai/snowboy (by leon-ai)

   

   create a fork of Snowboy

7. Porcupine  

   6 31 3,862 8.3 Python

   On-device wake word detection powered by deep learning

   

   I found some alternatives such as Porcupine from Picovoice that works pretty well. But at the moment I'm writing this, their tooling does not allow to have short hotword like Leon. Which is in fact a best practice, but it means we'd need to comply such limitations.

8. nlp.js

   7 9 6,319 1.0 JavaScript

   An NLP library for building bots, with entity extraction, sentiment analysis, automatic language identify, and so more

   

   Since the previous release, NLP.js pushed a lot of work and has released a major version, moving from a monolithic library to multiple independent packages. So I spent some time to make Leon's NLP compatible to the latest changes.

9. fastify

   8 127 32,831 9.6 JavaScript

   Fast and low overhead web framework, for Node.js

   

   Most of the time we hear about Express.js because it is a well established web framework in the Node.js ecosystem, since the early days. But Fastify also joined the OpenJS Foundation which means it is also serious.

10. v8.dev

    9 77 960 6.7 JavaScript

    The source code of v8.dev, the official website of the V8 project.

    

    The V8 JavaScript engine version.

11. husky

    10 145 32,948 8.1 JavaScript

    Git hooks made easy 🐶 woof!

    

    Leon was using Husky that was triggering a script I wrote to parse a commit message on the commit-msg Git hook.

12. gitpod

    11 119 13,074 9.8 TypeScript

    The developer platform for on-demand cloud development environments to create software faster and more securely.

    

    You can try it here.

13. Express

    12 752 66,068 8.9 JavaScript

    Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for node.

    

    Most of the time we hear about Express.js because it is a well established web framework in the Node.js ecosystem, since the early days. But Fastify also joined the OpenJS Foundation which means it is also serious.

14. browserify

    13 35 14,635 5.3 JavaScript

    browser-side require() the node.js way

    

    The web app was using some Node.js features and Browserify. This is an unnecessary layer in our case. I wanted every feature be natively supported by the browsers as upcoming clients will also be natively supported by their respected platform.

15. babel-sublime

    14 153 3,256 0.0 JavaScript

    Syntax definitions for ES6 JavaScript with React JSX extensions.

    

    While Babel is an awesome JavaScript compiler, I was considering to drop it. Leon does not need to be ahead of current specifications, I felt it was a good choice to drop dependencies related to Babel as it'd lighten the dependency tree (which means faster install, less maintenance work and less potential security issue).

Suggest a related project