Supporting Aravinda V K

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 6 lakhs to Aravinda VK, in support of his continued work on Sanka, Chitra, Binnacle, Dataframes (D) and other open source projects.

How it started

Aravinda's introduction to free and open source software goes back to 2006, through local Linux user groups and install fests. He was struck by a simple idea, that you could publish your code for anyone to use, learn from, or build on. Two decades later, that idea has turned into a small constellation of open source projects, most of which he still maintains largely on his own, alongside his work as a Partner at Kadalu Investments.

The projects

Sanka is a set of tools for working with Kannada text – encoding conversions, and font and script tooling for the language. Its ASCII-to-Unicode conversion tool is relied on by government offices and organisations, and it powers part of the tooling behind Zerodha's Alar Kannada dictionary. The Sanka app on its own now sees around 50,000 users a month, many of whom have made their own YouTube tutorials to help others use it.

Chitra ("drawing" in Kannada) is a 2D graphics library that lets you generate images and PDFs programmatically, using a simple, readable command syntax inspired by Drawbot and Processing. Built on Cairo and Pango, it's natively supported in the D programming language, with Lua bindings in progress to make it usable from virtually any language or the command line.

Binnacle is an imperative testing and infrastructure automation framework, currently used internally to test and provision GlusterFS clusters and their REST-based storage management APIs. Its syntax is meant to be simple enough that a new test writer or admin can get productive within minutes.

Dataframes (D) brings a Pandas-like dataframe library to the D programming language.

The Grant

The 6 lakh grant will go toward sustaining Aravinda's time across the open source projects. Work planned includes fixing bugs reported by Sanka's users, and rebuilding it as a JavaScript library so that developers can embed it properly inside mobile apps or web pages, instead of wrapping the entire web app the way many users currently do. On Chitra, the grant supports continued work on the Lua bindings and curve support, to make the library easier to adopt outside the D ecosystem. Binnacle and Dataframes (D) will see ongoing maintenance, enhancements, and documentation, with Dataframes (D) moving toward a wider release to D language user groups once it's ready.