Release Radar · August 2021 Edition

The end of financial year is complete, tax time is over, and everyone is back to shipping awesome projects. During August, our community has been super busy shipping lots of new updates. These new releases include everything from world-changing tech to weekend hobbies. Here are some of our top staff picks of amazing open source projects that shipped major releases this month.

Grafana 8.0

Data and metrics are nothing without visualisations. Tools to help you understand your data and how to act on it is critical to decision making. Grafana is an open source platform for querying, visualising, alerting on, and understanding your metrics. It doesn’t even matter where your data is stored. With Grafana, you can create pretty dashboards and share them with your team. Version 8.0 comes with new opt-in features. These features allow you to centralise your alerting information. You can create and edit these alert rules for all your apps. Check out the blog post for all the details.

D3 7.0

No, it isn’t a three-sided dice 🤦‍♀️ D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents! It’s a JavaScript library for visualising data using web standards. Where Grafana analyses and adds alerts to your data, D3 brings your data to life with *.svgs, canvas, and HTML. Not only does D3 allow you to visualise the data, but you can also manipulate and interact with it. The latest release includes the addition of new modules, and lots of new ways to manipulate the data. Read all the changes and fixes in the release notes. Fun fact: D3 is another library available as part of Observable, which we featured in the May Release Radar.

Chainlink 1.0

Smart contracts are becoming more prominent in the tech industry. Chainlink is a middleware designed to simplify communication with blockchains. Chainlink makes it easy for you to connect your on-chain smart contracts to any off-chain computation or API. There are multiple ways to do this, and it all runs on secure and flexible infrastructure. Big congrats to the team on shipping version 1.0 🥳

Postal 2.0

Want a fully featured open source mail delivery platform for your emails? Then Postal it is! Postal runs on your own servers. This project was originally developed by Krystal to suit their own email processing needs. The team decided the community could benefit from their platform, and so released this as an open source project. Version 2.0 has a few handy bug fixes and an update to the UI. Check it out, and get on top of your mail.

FSNotes 5.0

Okay, so you have your email sorted… but what about your notes? FSNotes is a note manager for macOS and iOS. You can view your notes, access them from anywhere with iCloud Drive or Dropbox, and even have your notes written in plaintext or RTF files. It’s fast, and works quickly with over 10,000 files. That’s a lot of notes! Version 5.0, AKA FSNotes 5, has tonnes of new features and improvements. There are over 50 bug fixes, and there is added support for hierarchy, advanced tags, sidebar, and more. Read up on all the new features on their changelog.

Locust 2.0

Testing your code is an important step in the development process of any product or feature. With Locust, testing the performance of your code is made easy. It’s scriptable, and scalable. As the user, you can define the behaviour of your users in regular Python code. This means your testing environment isn’t constrained by a UI or domain specific language. The latest version of Locust contains some “breaking” changes… and they mean that literally. Read the release notes to make sure these new API changes don’t break your existing Locust files.

ntopng 5.0

Do you need to monitor your network traffic? ntopng is here for you. It’s a web-based network traffic monitoring application that was originally written in 1998 😮! ntopng can capture packages, record your traffic, probe the network, and analyse web-based traffic. Version 5.0 includes an advanced alert engine with security features. ntopng now has the ability to collect flows from more routers and detect anomalies. For more on breakthroughs, new features, and improvements, check out the release notes.

Reaction 4.0

We’ve talked a lot about Node.js, React, and GraphQL on the GitHub blog. Now Reaction combines them all. Reaction is a commerce platform built using these three tools. It also “plays nicely” with NPM, Docker, and Kubernetes. The newest release of React has some bug fixes, plus you can now use account-js for auth. With version 4.0, hydra and identity are no longer shipped by default. Read more about these changes in the release notes.

GitHub CLI 2.0

We couldn’t go past our own GitHub CLI. Yes, it’s open source, and you can be a part of the action. Since we shipped 1.0, the community has loved being able to work in the command line. Now, with version 2.0, you can make the CLI work even better for you. CLI 2.0 supports extensions, meaning you can build custom commands to better suit your workflow. Read more about extensions on our blog post, and check out the docs to learn how to build your own extensions.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon 1.0

After everyone’s hard work for mid year and EOFY, we just had to include a fun project this month. Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a rogue-like RPG (Role Playing Game) that is random. What do we mean by random? 🤔 Literally everything is random: randomly generated items, levels, enemies, and traps. If you need a bit of random-ness in your life, try out Shattered Pixel Dungeon while you’re waiting for your next compile. It’s available on Google Play, the App Store, or download it directly on GitHub. Congrats to the team for releasing version 1.0 after seven years of development 🎉

August Release Radar

Well that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, whether it was version 1.0 or version 8.0. Keep up the great work everyone! If you’ve got a new release coming, we’d love to see it. Tag us when you share your release on social media, and we’ll keep an eye out. If you missed out on our last Release Radar, check out the amazing community projects from mid year.

Written by

Michelle Mannering

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.