Author of Monica/Chandler here.
Thanks for posting this.
As others have pointed out, we are rewriting Monica from scratch, codename Chandler: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler
I would really encourage you to push forward with OfficeLife. I believe the HR space is primed and ready for a decent open source offering. For what it's worth, APIs would be super useful, e.g. in the recruiting world there are hundreds of different background checks etc. that anyone serious needs to integrate with.
I am not too sure about officelife, but i think there is a market for internal relationship management at middle and large companies - often a mark of success is managing the internal network.
This has been badly damanged during lockdown - just walking past someone's desk and being reminded I need to speak to them was useful. And just saying hi kept the "relationship" fresh
I've never heard of this software category before. For decades, I've managed this info with an online calendar (annual reminders for birthdays, for example), and online contact/address book (notes section heavily levegered). This is pretty cool - thanks for bringing it to my attention!
First, thank you for your work. I must admit though I was hoping that the rewrite would be in Go (or Rust) for the simple use case of a dead-simple binary deploy with a built in sqlite or rocks/level database that can handle as many users as you can throw at it on a $2-5 VPS instance.
(I'm super proud to say that we have an official Docker image, official being the label the Docker granted us last year as they (Docker, the company) maintain it. There are not a lot of official Docker images, but we are part of it, and it's awesome)
In terms of simplicity, nothing beats PHP. It's easily deployable everywhere, everyone knows how to use this simple language, and the Laravel ecosystem is fantastic. But I understand what you mean.
I've been using PHP for a decade and recently started building APIs in Go. Everything about the process has been significantly simpler, from packages to testing to deploying and debugging. I don't think I can ever go back, and this is coming from someone who still loves PHP and works with both Go and Laravel daily.
I've been exploring doing some of my PHP stuff in Go and my opinion has been the complete opposite. PHP, I can just start composing a page; Go, I have to implement a router and serving static content.
This is only true if you have a LAMP server already. On none of my servers runs PHP, so setting that up would be definitly more work than adding another binary to my systemd.
How so? If you use Docker, there are all-in-one images. If you use conventional deployment, there are howto guides and/or meta packages to get things up and running.
Besides, a lot of people use shared hosting for any number of reasons. Anything not PHP based is doomed there.
You can self host. We highly recommend that you self host. We prefer if you self host.
If you use our own version, it’s not as safe, obviously, even though we do our best to keep it secure.
No. It's a codename in reference to Monica and the Friends tv show. Chandler being the one who dates Monica (no spoiler).
Right now we have two repos on Github, but we have to find a way to merge Chandler to Monica in the future so we don't lose those precious stars :-)
I usually despise comments that point out that two pieces of (almost always unrelated) software share the same (or a similar) name. That doesn't apply in this case—
Chandler has not only already been used for another piece of software, it has been used for something in what is roughly the same space. The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago, but I had to double check and triple check to suss out whether or not your Chandler is actually a reboot + a rewrite. And I'm still hedging (but I think the answer is "no, they're completely separate"). That's a confusing amount of similarity.
EDIT: it looks like this has been pointed out. Even though it's "just" a codename, I'd recommend changing it to something like "chauncey" or "bingaling" or "miss-bong" or "skidmark" or something.
Parent isn’t wrong. Chandler was a very interesting distributed PIM in (I think) the very early 2000s. It collapsed under the weight of its own ambition but it’s a significant piece of software history, one of those alternative paths.
And yes it’s a TV character too, but Parent isn’t wrong to point out the name collision.
1. Knowing (or not knowing) that Chandler is a character on Friends has nothing to do with the comments here.
2. You are the woooshed. "Chauncey", "Bingaling", and "Miss [Chanandler] Bong" are all (semi-obscure) names that were used to refer to Chandler Bing at some point during the series. All suitable alternatives for a project codename. (Not that it matters, because, again whether one knows any of this has nothing to do with the issue being discussed. Your explanation is not exculpatory. It's not an affirmative defense. It's just... nothing. It's like a cow's opinion; it's moo.)
Why do you think this is relevant to the topic of whether it's okay to use the name "Chandler" after having already been used for another personal information management tool?
We've also written OfficeLife, an open source tool to manage your employees: https://github.com/officelifehq/officelife, yet to be released.
I think we have too many ideas and side projects :-)