Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

Morningfame would not have been possible without countless open source projects that provide helpful tools, software libraries, and assets. As we nowadays take the success of open source for granted, we need to remember that 30 years ago creating the same products would have required multiples of the effort we need today.

Only few open source projects ask for the attribution of their work. Nonetheless, we would like to reach further and give credit where credit is due.

The work you see as a user

Most of the artwork was taken from Emoji One which especially make the reported metrics compelling.

Combining the emojis with Prisma using its “Urban” style makes it almost look like a real artist made her impact.

A real challenge to make Morningfame look good is designing the weekly emails. The email templates are designed using Foundation for Emails which really saved us many headaches. If you are a web developer you know how messy things can get if you need to support all different browsers. Designing HTML emails is like webpage design – but still in the 90’s!

Besides having the good looks we also focus on security. And our users can help by using strong passwords.

Luckily, there is one software library which really knows how to measure the strength of a password: zxcvbn.

Try some passwords!

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The work that hides in the background

What the user can see is actually just the tip of the iceberg. In the background we employ hundreds of open source software libraries that make our job doable. Primarily they save us the effort to implement basic functionality ourselves. Secondly their code contains the knowledge of experts which would be hard to come by.

To give you an idea of what we mean with “contains knowledge of experts” let us give you an explanation in regard to the software library moment-timezone that helps us calculating “in a week, 7am” to send the next weekly email. Depending on where the user lives on the globe this may be a completely different time or even day!

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And much more

Although we would like to give credit to all open source projects that in a way made Morningfame possible, the list would grow too long and thus the projects mentioned above are just a small piece of the pie. Regardless of whether they are mentioned or not, we are happy to see that each and every of these projects have diligent maintainers who often spend their free time to add value to the public pool of open source assets.

We understand that the landscape of open source projects is an ecosystem that needs to be kept in balance. That is why we are committed to contribute back by submitting bug fixes and also by maintaining open source projects ourselves. Some of the more noteworthy ones are:

• Colorizr.js - A tool to draft and finetune the color palette of a website
• request-promise - A library to enhance making HTTP requests with node.js
• express-print-routes - A library to keep track of your node.js’ REST API endpoints
• hpp - A library to safeguard against an important security vulnerability

All these projects and many more were developed to be used for Morningfame and shared with the world. This way, we believe, open source will continue to thrive and serve as the foundation for many products like Morningfame.