The trendy five: Warming up in wintry weather with GitHub in January 2019

Every month, we scour the GitHub trending page for 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. This month we opened up 2019 with a bang!

So, without further ado, here are our top picks (in no particular order)!

CloudQuery

Created by Tim Quian, CloudQuery turns any website into serverless API (with SPA support).

Try it for yourself. It’s as simple as just a few clicks: just enter the site’s URL and choose your content. Then, without any further input, it generates an API. For an example of how this tool can be used, see the CloudFetch site, which collects fetchers from news-worthy websites using the CloudQuery tool.

While this tool is fairly limited in terms of use cases, it’s still a notable project that’s simple and to the point. (And who doesn’t love a good, clean GUI?) Take a look for yourself and play around with it, you might get some ideas.

Find out more about CloudQuery here.

DBeaver

DBeaver is a multiplatform, universal database tool and SQL client. How universal is it? DBeaver supports any database with a JDBC driver, which includes nearly all databases. Supported databases include, but are not limited to: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Firebird, DB2, and more.

There are plenty of database tools out there, but DBeaver is worth checking out. The UI is stable and easy to use (though it looks a bit busy when first starting). Read the long list of features in its documentation, there’s simply too many to list here!

The latest update added some improvements to the data viewer and SQL editor, as well as improved dark theme support. Read the changelog and see what the beaver is building. (Need an enterprise version? Yup, there’s also an enterprise version too.)

Find out more about DBeaver here.

Flair

Flair is natural language processing at its best. This NLP library was developed by Zalando Research (yes, the fashion store!) and is based on PyTorch 0.4+ and Python 3.6+.

Since fashion is all about the hottest names, of course Flair includes named entity recognition (NER), which identifies and highlights fashion terms, designers, articles of clothing, and colors. With the help of the community, Flair is multilingual and continues to add new languages with each new version.

At the beginning of the month, we highlighted this fashion-forward framework. For those interested, you can give it a try and follow the tutorial. Zalando Research also published a paper explaining contextual string embeddings for sequence labeling.

Find out more about Flair here.

Tilt

What do we love even more than Kubernetes? Kubernetes with no stress. Tilt allows you to develop all of your microservices locally in Kubernetes alongside your team. We are all about better, more transparent workflows!

From the GitHub repo:

“Tilt helps you develop your microservices locally. Run tilt up to start working on your services in a complete dev environment configured for your team.

Tilt watches your files for edits, automatically builds your container images, and applies any changes to bring your environment up-to-date in real-time. Think docker build && kubectl apply or docker-compose up.”

Setting up a project is fast, and according to the tutorial, setting up your new session takes just 15 minutes.

Find out more about Tilt here.

Gin

Is Gin your drink of choice? Regardless of your drink order, Gin is a fast HTTP web framework written in Go. Its Martini-like API is all about speed, speed, speed, (thanks to httprouter) but also retains productivity and has a small memory footprint.

If you’re familiar with Martini, then you will master Gin easily, since they are so alike.

Several projects have already been written with Gin, including drone, gorush, fnproject, photoprism, krakend, and picfit.

(If you like Gin but are still looking for other frameworks to test, take a look at Echo. According to Echo’s benchmarks, it is slightly better than Gin. Which is the best will most likely be up to a matter of opinion!)

Find out more about Gin here.

Gatsby

Wait, this is the trendy five, not the trendy six! That’s true, but we honestly could not limit it to just five this month. There were simply too many projects that grabbed our attention!

Gatsby is a modern framework for creating fast websites with the power of React and GraphQL. It is simple to use and creates fast, dynamic web pages.

Users with limited experience can benefit from Gatsby’s easy to follow getting started tutorial. The simple tutorial even walks users through how to install Node.js and Git and explains (in plain language) all about CSS, Gatsby plugins, and preparing a site to go live.

If you’ve already created a site with Gatsby, feel free to show it off in the showcase, or just browse for some inspiration. At the end of January, Gatsby introduced themes, opening the accessibility door even wider for new users to get started and build a site.

Find out more about Gatsby here.

Honorable mention: Pizza dough

Okay so, this won’t necessarily improve your workflow, manage your databases, or help you create a website. But it will help you figure out what to make for dinner.

GitHub user Hendrik Kleinwaechter walks you through the perfect pizza dough recipe. In his Bread Code Manifesto he wrote, “If you love programming, you will also enjoy baking some bread”. Can we get a venn diagram of programmers and bakers?

One thing is for sure, kneading dough after a busy day is one of the most productive ways to de-stress. So get baking!