The time I unboxed my MacBook Pro M1, my mother happened to be sitting near me. She tells how when I first opened the lid, my expression was one of awe, and I feel blessed to have access to this feat of engineering to this day.
The hardware is killer - we already know that. But there are also a plethora of beautifully designed and lovingly crafted pieces of software one of which is:
Raycast
Even non-Mac users have heard of Alfred:
Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.
Though I tried out Alfred we never really gelled and very soon I discovered Raycast:
Your shortcut to everything.
Alfred allows customization - no doubts about that. But Raycast’s ecosystem of extensions and scripts is 100% open-source. As developers, we like to have control or at least the option of control; we want to know that if needed, we can get our hands dirty and fix what is bothering us.
I didn’t have a lot of open-source contributions pre-Raycast yet as of today…
Out of 1,958 contributors,
I am in the top 8!
Open Source as a Service
The trend of startups that put “Open Source” front-and-center is not new but it has certainly ramped up these past few years. Startups like:
- OpenStatus - A better way to monitor your services.
- Resend - Email for developers
- Supabase - The Open Source Firebase Alternative
- Unkey - Build better APIs faster
- Webstudio - Advanced Open Source Website Builder
…all have Open Source at their heart. There are countless articles on the tenets of this approach e.g. this one by Upsun but in a nutshell: these startups leverage the benefits of OSS to “build in public” whilst fostering an environment that encourages public feedback. Thanks to Tailwind CSS and tools like shadcn/ui, design is covered. And by leveraging other Open Source offerings, it’s a you scratch my back I scratch yours ecosystem where one tool is helping the other build. Eventually, the startup comes out with a Pro offering that allows revenue to be generated.
Raycast handles this beautifully:
- There’s an active Slack community (https://www.raycast.com/community)
- There are detailed dev docs
- There are (as of this moment) ~1,839 extensions in the Raycast Store ALL of which can be seen and contributed to by anyone
- They have a Pro offering
My Raycast Journey
As I began to use Raycast, I finally found the chance to start contributing more actively to OSS. The first extension I added was for Purelymail (Cheap, no-nonsense email - highly recommended) followed by one for Porkbun (hands-down one of my favorite domain registrars). Eventually, following the classic advice of “contribute to something you use yourself” I began to submit more extensions and push updates for those that already existed. At this point I am confidently a “Raycast Extraordinaire”.
Wrapped
To wrap this up, here’s my Raycast Wrapped 2024 Summary - see y’all next year 🫡.