Mila WuTime for an End of Year Review for 2023! 🎉
AI is the keyword of 2023, but there is so much more to this past year in the realm of open source! We at Star History HQ gathered a few categories and picked our favorite project for each category, including:
- AI
- Database
- DevTool
- Front-end
- Security
- Web3
AI: LangChain
LangChain was first released in October 2022 as an open-source side project, a framework that makes developing AI applications more flexible. It got so popular that it was promptly turned into a startup.
In 2023, LangChain managed to gain ~70k stargazers, scoring a $10M seed round, grew exponentially product-wise: the framework now consists of several parts, integrations with 20+ different LLM providers, 10+ different vector databases, and more, lowering AI's threshold for the people. For example, they have this SQL Agent so that you can build a Q&A chain and agent over an SQL database.
2023 was the first "real" year of LLM app development, and they must now have a clearer vision of how to construct the product to better enable people to use AI.
Database: Neon
Neon is an open-source serverless Postgres offering.
Postgres took over the first spot from MySQL and became the most admired and desired database in 2023, as per Stack Overflow's annual survey. Neon is smart and stands on top of the giant by bringing Postgres to the cloud. They landed a $46M Series B funding in August 2023 (see, last year wasn't JUST about ChatGPT and AI!)
Neon uses a shared-storage architecture that separates the compute and storage. The compute part is a PostgreSQL server, the storage part is a custom-built multi-tenant storage system shared by all Postgres compute nodes.
DevTool: Nx
Nx is a set of DevTools to make it simpler for software dev teams to work within a monorepo, which is a version-controlled code repository that contains several projects. Think of Nx as a VSCode of build tools.
The funding team saw a need for tools to make it simpler for devs to store related apps and libraries in one shared code repository, and so they built Nx. You can speed up your builds and tests, locally and on CI, and integrate and automate your tooling via its plugins.
It's worth noting that they closed a $16 million Series A last year.
Front-end: Astro
Astro is a front-end framework to simplify building static websites and web applications. It has support for various popular frameworks, including React, Vue, and Svelte, so it is also possible to add dynamic elements to your pages using your preferred frameworks.
You can use Astro to build your website - whatever its purpose: event, marketing, e-commerce, blog. One key element of Astro is it automatically removes unused JavaScript and renders to HTML for better core web vitals, conversion rates and SEO, and that's what we love!
Astro had a big year. They started with ~23k stargazers and ended with a 60% increase to ~38k.
Security: Teleport
Teleport is an SSH for Clusters and Teams and aims to be the drop-in replacement for OpenSSH.
Teleport removes the need for VPNs, comes with a beautiful new Web UI, and provides a unified access plane for all your infrastructure: servers, Kubernetes, internal web apps, databases, and cloud provider APIs across all your infrastructure.
When it comes to infrastructure security, you should be skeptical and pragmatic: it'd be smart to put more trust in a product that's been around a while, so that it's trialed and tested, and probably not going anywhere anytime soon (FYI: Teleport debuted on Hacker News way back in 2016, and they recently released Teleport 15).
Web3: zkSync
Aside from AI, Web3 was also having a moment in 2023, and Crypto is more than just about currency!
zkSync is a ZK rollup, a layer-2 protocol that uses cryptographic validity proofs to provide scalable and low-cost transactions on Ethereum.
zkSync is one of the most recognized layer-2 scaling solutions for Ethereum. What makes zkSync stand out from other layer-2 protocols is that it can significantly reduce gas costs without sacrificing security or user control, making it cheaper and faster for users to interact with Ethereum smart contracts.
To Wrap Up
What a year, huh? We've witnessed some pretty amazing growth and ideas come to life.
And, thank you for following Star History through 2023. We are excited and ready for what the New Year has in store for us!
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