Let me introduce you to Shyshka!

I’m participating in “Daj sie poznać” contest and one of the requirements is to create open source project and to blog about it at least once a week (you need to publish 2 posts a week - one project related and the second can be about broadly defined IT).

What?

My project is called Shyshka - it’s an online personal dictionary. This is an open source project and it can be found on github here.

Why?

Out of personal need - I’m doing my best to master English and one of the best advices I got was to start hunting for words and interesting phrases.

Whenever I heard something interesting - I wrote it down, whenever I wanted to say something and didn’t know how - I made note out of it. Learning English became very fun - whenever I watched TV, read something in English or just spoke with someone in that language I kept my ears open to catch new phrases or unknown sentences.

Firstly, I went old school - I was writing them down in a notebook. It had worked for me at the beginning, until my dictionary grew. I wasn’t able to find sentences I had saved previously nor edit any of them. I needed something more advanced.

I had a couple of requirements:

• it has to be accessible online
• adding new words and phrases has to be as easy as possible
• I need the ability to search through my dictionary

After a small research I found out that there is nothing that meets my requirements. This is when the idea of project Shyshka was born.

How?

Shyshka will be a simple web app to store sentences, translations and examples of uses.

I want to take this opportunity to learn a new web framework, called Hanami.

I’m a big ruby enthusiast, but I’m not so fond of Ruby on Rails, which is the most popular web framework in the ruby world.

Hanami is not in the mainstream yet, but it tries to address the problems where Rails is not so great:

• it’s lightweight
• it supports good software engineering practices
• and it’s threadsafe.

I will write more about this awesome framework in one of the future posts.