Spotlight: Manas Jayanth

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I am a software developer looking to making programming more enjoyable and software development less painful. This is deeply motivated by my personal experiences writing code for a living and a lucrative yet challenging profession.

I saw great personal growth as a programmer and developer. I hope I can make it accessible to a lot many in my own small ways.

Are you currently working or have worked for a company in the past? What have been some notable achievements from your time there?

I’m currently employed as a contractor. Before this, it was about nine months of full-time open source funded by generous donors (glad to see DeepSource be one of them now). Before this, I worked at a media-tech startup. I built consumer-facing products there - from apps to APIs. These days, I provide my expertise in OCaml.

What inspired you to start (or join) this project?

Simplicity of the tool - it was esy peasy!

At my last company, I had to build a performance-sensitive, multimedia processing pipeline. Javascript or any interpreted language (despite the JIT) didn’t make the cut. I need the speed of a language like C but the maintainability of JS.

I found Reason. Esy let me install my C and Reason deps reliably and intuitively. It was constantly and in development, and where it lacked in features, it made up for in reliability and welcoming community. Using it meant actively involved in its development, which was a pleasant experience as the maintainers, Andrey Popp, was very welcoming. It was a great learning experience. My time spent on the project gained me a lot more things that I gave back, I believe. Thanks, Andrey!

What’s a brief description of this project?

Esy strives to be an intuitive and reliable package manager for Reason and OCaml by borrowing ideas from Javascript and OCaml ecosystems.

What is the primary problem that this project solves?

Package management for Reason and OCaml.

What are some of the challenges you face as a maintainer?

Balancing newcomer expectations. There are active marketing and selling of developer tools out there. I don’t think it’s bad, but when overdone, newcomers develop unrealistic expectations of tools thanks to a blog post by their favorite thought leader.

What is your vision/roadmap for the future of this project?

To make natively compiled software development more joyful and at the very least less painful. I think the founding developers put together a great tool with valuable primitives. My goal is to utilize them, build on top of them, share the knowledge, and see Esy in more hands.

How can someone install/download this project?

npm i -g esy

Is there a link to the documentation?

Yup. https://esy.sh

Who is the ideal user of this project? What are some use cases of using this project?

Anyone looking to build Reason or OCaml projects with both JavaScript and native targets.

Are there any success stories about other people or organizations using this project that you would like to share?

Esy is driving the development at Outrun Labs, makers of Onivim.

What is coming up in the next release?

Simpler lock files, cross compilation among others. Stay tuned.