Maintaining LWT

Hi there!

In this post I’ll delve into a project which has taken a big part of my time for the last few months, the maintenance of an open-source language learning app: LWT.

LWT, standing for Learning With Texts, is a wonderful tool to learn text in your web browser, but it was quite abandoned 10 years ago, and it has not reached a larger audience since it was a bit difficult to use. So, I decided to blow the dust out of it, and started working on the GitHub community-maintained version. For those interested, the original project was posted at SourceForge.net.

Basically, the target was to give the tool the audience it deserved. The main targets were:

• Easy installation
• Mobile compatibility
• More secure

Of course, many subquests came along the way, and I finished by doing much more than expected. In the end, it was a good introduction to full-stack development and project management as many things were to be done in a very short time. Now, I think that the project is much easier to maintain, so that independent developers can figure out how to do their own stuff without having a hard time understanding the code.

Let’s talk a bit about the reason for which I started maintaining LWT. After I discovered LingQ, I found the tool very good, but also very expensive as many language learners are children. So, I decided to work on his open-source alter ego, LWT. Moreover, after spending time studying Japanese, I needed a robust tool to master the writing system, and reading books can turn out to be a pain if you cannot read words, let alone get the meaning.

Another motivation was a personal challenge. I mostly did front-side development, and this was a much more ambitious full-stack project. I had no previous experience in PHP, or more generally, how a server internally works, so it was a good introduction to the domain. I could also try a new set of tools and utilities, which is why in my first commits things were a bit confused.

Finally, I have been working on this project for almost a year now, and things are much better. I think I could tackle most of the urgent problems, and for the rest of the work, it will diverge from what LWT originally was and is much more related to where I want to go next. So stay tuned, as I may start on a successor for LWT from now on!