My GitHub - A New Beginning
After I finished cleaning up my GitHub account last month it bugged me how empty it was. On the other side, I didn’t want to upload just anything, as that would have lead to another clean up. So I spent a few days thinking about it and in the mean time I managed to read the book App Architecture (more on that in the next post) which inspired me to rewrite my two apps currently on the AppStore.
The first app - Link As You Go - I wrote after a conference last year and although people praised me for it, it never got much traction. Which is sad, but on the bright side it means I can safely rewrite it without worrying about breaking it for anyone. Moreover, I could even open-source it and get some feedback from the community.
With that plan in mind, I started looking at the source code. I didn’t want to publish it as is for several reasons, one of which was the API keys I had in the source code. So I decided to start with separating the Azure Computer Vision OCR service from the rest of the code and put it in a framework. It sounded like a good first candidate to be open-sourced.
Few hours later, I have the first new repository on GitHub - ComputerVisionOCR. It is published under The Unlicense, which basically means you can do whatever, just don’t blame me. As for the framework - it can help you send a photo with some text in it to the Azure servers and have the text extracted from it. The service is free for up to 5000 transactions (photos) a month and then you have to start paying. You can learn more about it here. My framework provides only the OCR service and for the moment is not configurable - the only thing you can change is the server URL you are using (they differ per continent/area).
If you like the framework and wanna help, jump in - PRs welcome!