Earlier this year I spent 6 months in Brazil doing an ethnographic study of software developers in Rio de Janeiro. Much of the study focused on an Kepler – an open source project to build a web development platform on top of Lua. I started the study thinking of being an observer without getting too involved, but soon decided to abandon this approach and dive in. I'll talk more about this at some point (I am working on a paper on the methodological issues of studying open source work), but for now I wanted to introduce the baby of that project, which just got to version “0.3.0-beta” and is finally worthy of being show to the world at large. So, here we go:

Sputnik is a wiki written in Lua, running on top of Kepler. It’s also somewhat of a web-framework, in that it is intended to be extensible into a wide range of wiki-like applications. (Basically anything that involves data being edited in wiki-like way.) I wrote the first version on a Saturday afternoon for the Kepler wiki, and it generated enough interest that I ended up investing some time into refining it. I then started thinking of how to make it take advantage of being written in Lua, how to make it “more Lua,” and ended up going the route of extensibility. It also uses Lua as configuration language.

This has been one of the most fun projects that I've been involved with, not just technically but socially. The fun of working within a small community is that people actually pay attention.

P.S. Someone on the web recently said the following about Sputnik: “ps. lua 的描述能力还是很强的，如果有人怀疑 lua 在 web 开发上的潜力的话，可以看看 Sputnik 这个 wiki 系统 。整个系统号称只用了不到 2000 行 lua 代码。作者宣称会继续努力把代码精简到 1000 行之内。” Ah, one day my Mandarin will be good enough to actually read this. For now I just get to ponder the weirdness of having people say stuff about your hobby project in languages you don’t quite understand.