Open Source Roundup: February Highlights
February 2021 produced another strong batch of open source releases. The projects below span build tools, visualization engines, and developer utilities — in no particular order.
Homebrew 3.0
Homebrew, the package manager that fills gaps left by your OS, reached version 3.0. This release adds Apple Silicon support and introduces a new syntax for brew bottle and bottle do blocks. The project also became eligible for donations through GitHub Sponsors. Many additional changes are documented on the Homebrew website.
Cake 1.0
Cake (C# Make) is a cross-platform build automation system for compiling code, copying files and folders, running unit tests, compressing files, and building NuGet packages. Its defining feature is that build scripts are written in pure C#. The 1.0 release adds support for .NET 5 and C# 9, along with numerous bug fixes.
Puppeteer 8.0
Puppeteer automates most tasks you'd perform manually in a browser: taking screenshots, generating PDFs, submitting forms, simulating keyboard input, testing Chrome Extensions, capturing timeline traces, creating automated test environments, and crawling SPAs for pre-rendered content. Version 8.0 includes standard bug fixes and lets you specify the browser — Chrome or Chromium — explicitly.
Manim 1.0
Manim, the Python-based animation engine used by the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, hit its 1.0 milestone. The tool creates mathematical animations for educational purposes and is now available in a first stable release.
Iosevka 5.0
Iosevka is a typeface family for coding that offers sans-serif, slab-serif, monospace, and quasi-proportional styles. It currently covers 4,741 characters, 16,462 glyphs, 88 character variations, and 160 languages. Release 5.0 introduces support for cv## and ss## features, allows variant renaming, and adds many new characters and variants. Several breaking changes accompany this update, detailed in the release notes.
Ticker 3.0
Ticker is a terminal-based stock watcher and position tracker that supports multiple lots and quotes. Version 3.0 adds sorting capabilities, including sorting by position.
GitHub Pages Deploy 4.0
This free, community-built GitHub Action deploys production code to any branch via GitHub Pages with minimal configuration. The 4.0 release renames inputs from snake_case to lowercase, removes the requirement for a GitHub Token, and updates SSH handling to accept either true or private keys.
Ink 1.0
Ink uses a simple markup language for writing interactive fiction and stories for the web and games such as Heaven's Vault, 80 Days, and Sorcery. Designed for non-technical authors, Ink integrates with Unity and shipped its first major release.
Vuex 4.0
Following the Vue.js 3.0 release last October, Vuex 4.0 brings compatibility with Vue.js 3.0. This state management library for Vue.js draws inspiration from Flux, Redux, and the Elm Architecture. The 4.0 release introduces a new initialization process and several breaking changes.
Mineflayer 3.0
Mineflayer, a Node.js library for creating stable, powerful bots in Minecraft, released version 3.0. The update includes bug fixes and significant Windows API changes.
Gitemon
For a lighter note, Gitemon lets you "catch" members of a GitHub organization Pokémon-style. Enter an organization name on the site and collect its members to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pokémon.
