The trendy five: Beat the heat with our favorite July 2019 repos

Every month, we go over the GitHub trending page for any cool repos that stand out from the crowd. We choose five of the most innovative, interesting, and well-thought out projects to highlight in our monthly report. As always, it was tough to narrow down the list of GitHub repos to our five favorites.

So, in no particular order, here are our top picks for July 2019!

Milkman

Not just a source of calcium. Milkman is an extensible JavaFx-based workbench that takes its inspiration from Postman.

Milkman screenshot. (Dark mode also available.) Source.

The usage of plugins extends functionality. The release comes pre-packaged with the Http request plugin, but a few more are ready to download, including a PrivateBin sharing plugin (with a handy Burn After Reading feature), Git Team Synchronization plugin, and more. If you have a specific usage, this project encourages users to write their own.

Check out the plugin development guide for more information regarding building your own.

The latest release is version 3.3.0. Check out the changelog and see what’s new. According to the roadmap, future versions plan to include more exports, different request types, and a JavaScript runner for pre-request actions and response testing.

Apollo 11

This July marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. One of the heroes of space travel is. of course, the code behind the hardware. The original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for the command and lunar modules is available on GitHub.

Draper Laboratory; restored by Adam Cuerden. [Public domain]

Some interesting tidbits from the source code that show our spaceflight heroes had a sense of humor:

BURN_BABY_BURN–MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc

# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE

# GOODBYE. COME AGAIN SOON.

If you really want a blast from the past, grab the Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer software and compile the original code.

Apollo

No, this isn’t a duplicate listing. Apollo is an open autonomous driving platform from Baidu Inc.

Hardware overview. Source.

The latest release, version 5.0. supports 360-degree visibility and an upgraded perception deep learning model, making vehicles more secure. 5.0 also introduces more scenarios including pull over and crossing bare intersections.

Whether or not we will see this on the road, or competing with Tesla, has yet to be seen. For now, we can all marvel at the futuristic fact that an autonomous vehicle platform is available on GitHub. Follow these instructions to run the demo on your vehicle and have a conversation piece way more memorable than a sunroof.

Basic requirements include Docker, a 4-core processor, 8 GB memory minimum, Ubuntu 14.04 and oh yeah, a car.

LazyDocker

We previously highlighted LazyDocker, and feel it deserves another look since it showed up on GitHub’s trending page. LazyDocker is a simple, yet customizable terminal UI for Docker and Docker-Compose, written in Go with the use of of the gocui library.

According to the project creator:

Memorising docker commands is hard. Memorising aliases is slightly less hard. Keeping track of your containers across multiple terminal windows is near impossible. What if you had all the information you needed in one terminal window with every common command living one keypress away (and the ability to add custom commands as well). Lazydocker’s goal is to make that dream a reality.

It offers full keyboard and mouse support in the UI, customizable colors and high-contrast option, and the ability to create custom keybindings.

jExcel

Meet the Jquery plugin for embedding a user-friendly spreadsheet directly into your website. jExcel is “a lightweight vanilla JavaScript plugin to create amazing web-based interactive tables and spreadsheets compatible with Excel or any other spreadsheet software”.

With the plugin, you can create formulas, just like you would in an Excel spreadsheet. Customize the tables, import data, create custom column types, sort columns, and much more.