Open source is not dead. One of our engineers @iiamgio made GitHub Trending this week and hit the Hacker News front page for Quarkdown, his OSS project with 13.5K stars.
Quarkdown hit #1 on HN last year as well. That's how we found him and convinced him to move to SF from Sicily. I cold emailed him and offered him a job.
I initially assumed Quarkdown was built by a staff-level engineer with a bunch of maintainers, but it was just one student's project in Sicily.
Loved his write-up about the journey from overseas student to SF startup engineer.
https://t.co/0SeZX0Q64w
Maintaining an open source project changes how you see software you depend on.
When we hit friction with the libraries @falconer_ai relies on, we did something unusual for a startup: rather than working around the issues, we fixed them at the source:
https://t.co/TkLi6FFyM6
RIP LATEX.
RIP NOTION.
RIP POWERPOINT.
Quarkdown is a free open source typesetting system that compiles the same Markdown file into a print-ready PDF, an interactive presentation, a static website, or a full documentation wiki with one command.
Link: https://t.co/yBRv3VSnFA
Quarkdown v2.1.0 is here! Biggest highlights:
• Built-in skill for AI agents
• PDF artifacts are up to 90% smaller
• A lightweight JVM comes bundled. @CelestinEiffel you'll like this one
https://t.co/dXwvuh1F2k
Sales prep still looks like 2015. Search email, Notion, Slack. DM an engineer. Find an outdated doc.
Meanwhile your buyer waits on an integration question.
Outdated context means AI tools hit a dead end faster. Falconer gives reps cited answers in real time.