8 Open Source Tools Every Developer Should Know 🔥

TL;DR

It's been less than two weeks since my last article, and I've already prepared 8 open source tools that every developer should know.

Their knowledge will help in various programming situations that arise both in business and in personal projects.

And, as usual, if you have an interesting project worth adding to the project, we'd love to hear about it in the comments!

1. 💎 Hmpl-js - Fetch HTML, render it safely, and keep apps dynamic, modern, and small

Let's start with a small template language that will allow you to create a design on the server and then transfer it to the client on any domain.

HMPL.js provides the flexibility to build server-driven templates with minimal JavaScript.

🔍 View the hmpl-js repository ☆

2. ⚙️ GitMCP - free, open-source, remote MCP server for any GitHub project

The following project is a server implementing the MCP protocol that connects LLM directly to a GitHub repository.

GitMCP is a free, open-source, remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that transforms any GitHub project (repositories or GitHub pages) into a documentation hub.

🔍 View the GitMCP repository ☆

3. 📁 Linux kernel - Linux kernel source tree

Now let's look at something truly colossal. The next project needs no introduction, but if anyone doesn't know, it's the kernel of the Linux operating system, which you may be using to view this article.

The Linux kernel is the core of any Linux operating system. It manages hardware,
system resources, and provides the fundamental services for all other software.

🔍 View the Linux kernel repository ☆

4. 🗄️ Redis - Preferred, fastest, and most feature-rich cache, data structure server, and document and vector query engine.

If you need a fast response from your database, this system is 100% suitable.

non-relational NoSQL database management system

🔍 View the Redis repository ☆

5. 🗒 Readme.so - An online drag-and-drop editor to easily build READMEs

This handy README editor. If you're just starting out, this is a really good place to start.

Readme.so is an online editor to help developers make readmes for their project.

🔍 View the Readme.so repository ☆

6. 🧩 Shadcn UI - A set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform

Next on the list is a bundle of components that will help you create a modern design in just a couple of minutes. Most startups use this library as the main one for their design.

Accessible and customizable components that you can copy and paste into your apps. Free. Open Source. Use this to build your own component library.

🔍 View the Shadcn repository ☆

7. 🖥️ Tweakcn - A visual no-code theme editor for shadcn/ui components

Create custom themes for your apps in a visual editor. An AI module is included in the project, making theme generation easier and faster.

tweakcn is a powerful Visual Theme Editor for tailwind CSS & shadcn/ui components. It comes with Beautiful theme presets to get started, while aiming to offer advanced customisation for each aspect of your UI

🔍 View the Tweakcn repository ☆

8. 🔗 LangChain - Build context-aware reasoning applications

This is probably one of the fastest growing projects on GitHub, as the industry was simply blown away by the release of ChatGPT and this project combined the concepts of framework and AI prompt_template.invoke().

LangChain is a framework for building LLM-powered applications. It helps you chain together interoperable components and third-party integrations to simplify AI application development — all while future-proofing decisions as the underlying technology evolves.

🔍 View the LangChain repository ☆

✅ Conclusion

Knowledge of each new project allows you to most clearly understand the full depth of the problem, and, most importantly, understanding this will save a lot of time. In this article, I tried to give the most common projects for AI, backend and much more.

Thank you for reading the article!