The Unexpected Joys of Open Source
A brief flirtation with viral success brought new attention to one of my #Python libraries and some real-world applications of the workings of #OpenSource.
Readers who have stuck around might recall my big project last year. It was a study on the readability of legislation in Singapore and how much “Plain Laws” drafting affected it. (Spoiler alert: limited, if any).
I wrote a Python library called “#redlines” while writing that post. I needed to represent changes in text like the “track changes” function in Microsoft Word, which was the most familiar method to my audience of lawyers. I couldn't find any libraries to do this in Markdown, so I created one and published it anyway.
You can read more on “how it works” in the original post on this library.
I publish most of my coding publicly on my GitHub. I do it with little expectation that anyone would use it. This post discusses my motivations for publicising almost all of my coding work.
So, something strange happened while I was suffering from an acute attack of imposter syndrome last week. My humble Python library suddenly got stars, and I even received a pull request.