I'm working on a set of open-source applications to help collaborate on building software. Basic principles are better online communication between people(Pyrite - Galene SFU, channel-based chat), automating i18n and project management where feasible. Mostly experimental: https://github.com/garage44/garage44/
Expressio simplifies i18n workflows with tooling that works for both human translators and AI. Type-safe translations, AI translation support (DeepL, Claude), and code sync.
Instead of magic strings like `$t('menu.settings')`, you use typed references: `$t(i18n.menu.settings)`. TypeScript knows about all translations, IDE autocomplete works, and refactoring is safe. The type-safe approach also makes it easy for AI tools to understand and work with translations.
Features:
- AI translation via DeepL/Claude
- Type-safe translations (no magic strings)
- CLI + web UI
- Real-time WebSocket sync
- Lint to find missing translations in code
Works with i18next format. Uses a workspace file (`.expressio.json`) to track source text and translations.
Built partly with AI assistance to speed up development.
I can't believe people still buy the Purism scam after all these years...I ordered a Librem 5 and a Pinephone back in the days of the other supply chain story(Covid). The Pinephone flew in from China in less than 2 months; the Librem 5 took more than 4 years to arrive. All Purism offered during that time were "opportunities" to invest and exhausting delay stories about failing supply chains, while keeping their customers completely in the dark about their order state. Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism) to sell the same useless overpriced brick to.
Purism laptops were great when I was a customer. Very sad they couldn't fix the issues you're talking about. I wanted to support the company further, and I think they are doing sincere, good, important work, especially on the software side. But these communication and customer relationship issues didn't get better and I switched away.
Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.
I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.
> Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays
Yes, they did have huge refund and shipping time issues and I don't trust their time estimations anymore. They almost went bankrupt and couldn't issue refunds for a long time. However this is irrelevant today, as their devices are finally available to order and AFAIK the refunds were issued. There were never issues with security, backdoors (unlike Lenovo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...), nonfree software or the like.
The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.
I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.
While I'm not going to defend Purism the company, I just wanted to note I listen to MP3s on a daily basis using that useless overpriced brick I acquired used from ebay.
There was an option to pay like $20 for literally nothing just to support the idea of an open source phone. I did so many years ago.
Worst $20 I ever spent. The amount of spam I've gotten as an "investor" is fucking ridiculous. The amount of times I've opened my email to see an "investment opportunity" from Todd Weaver (originating from multiple email addresses, no functional way to unsubscribe) is downright insulting.
From the bottom of my heart: fuck Todd Weaver, whose name is at the bottom of hundreds of spam emails I've received going back years.
I'd be happy to provide dozens of examples in my inbox that prove otherwise, and that's just the ones that have escaped my spam folder over the years.
I can also provide you with examples of other people's less than flattering replies about the exact same issue that have somehow reached my inbox (I'm assuming due to a brief misconfiguration).
> Instead of preying on the goodwill of FOSS enthousiasts, they now try to tap into a new market (nationalism)
Designing and selling the only existing phone made in USA, when everything is produced in China and has a risk of containing backdoors, is as far from nationalism as it gets. (And I'm not an American.) It's true innovation and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists. Even though the USA turns into something bad, the phone runs an FSF-endorsed distro and provides schematics, so you can verify everything yourself (or rely on the community). You comment looks disingenuous to me.
They invented name "Liberty Phone" before Trump made this a thing. Perhaps they should rename it, I don't know. What I know is that this modern device is as free (as in freedom) as it gets today for modern devices.
Recently used Cursor/Claude sonnet to port ~30k lines of EOL Livescript/Hyperscript to Typescript/JSX in less than 2 weeks. That would have took at least several months otherwise. Definitively a force multiplier, for this kind of repetitional work.
Not hours; but days instead of months: porting around 30k lines of legacy livescript project to typescript. Most of the work is in tweaking a prompt for Claude (using Aider) so the porting process is done correctly.
Thankfully it seems like AI is best at automating the most tedious and arguably most useless endeavor in software engineering- rewriting perfectly good code in whatever the language du jour is.
Interesting approach! I like the idea of using an ast to find translation strings and to generate source strings by an llm from the context. My experience is the same. Having to deal with 6 languages and a fast changing application is impossible for small teams, so I ended up with asimilar approach where developers only edit the source text, and target translations are automatically kept in sync using Deepl. This solves the whole i18n dilemma of outdated/missing translations, by just focussing on the source texts. It would be great to be able to even generate the source texts from the $t tag. I'm slowly turning this into an open source developer tool: https://garage44.org/posts/expressio/expressio-machine-trans...
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