They say that scratching a programmer&#x27;s itch starts an open source project. But we all know that the itch can take us only so far. Sooner or later, it is the community that needs to get around a FOSS project in order to keep the flame alive.<p>We all know that there are many side-projects which begin life on github with many stars and then just wither away due to lack of users and finally, the devs too stop taking interest.<p>Few months ago, I went through the same cycle when I started a side-project Visual Alchemist (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;prahladyeri&#x2F;VisualAlchemist). It began its life as a tool to quickly draw a few database tables on a html canvas and export it as python-SQLAlchemy ORM code. I was working extensively on Python at that time, hence I started that project. As usual, the project just withered away after some time, but recently I&#x27;ve taken a renewed interest in its development again. This time, I don&#x27;t have any particular interest in Python, but I want to start making VA a generic tool that outputs to multiple formats apart from python-sqlalchemy. Things on the feature-map include raw sql formats (mysql, postresql, etc.) and other ORMs.<p>I invite you all to collaborate in this project of mine. The people I need most right now are users, beta-testers and document writers.<p>These are a few things I&#x27;ve done until now to show my commitment towards VA project:<p>1. Refactored the old code, and added raw mysql as an output format.
2. Changed the license from MIT to GNU GPLv3 to demonstrate my commitment towards this project.
3. Updated the project README file with all project details such as governance style (meritocracy) and contact details.
4. Created a subreddit as a discussion room to discuss improvements in VA.
5. Using my hilariously limited GIMP skills, even created a VA logo.
6. Created a hosted version of VA.
7. Defined the feature maps, so the project can have some vision about what to develop in the near term.
Anyone interested in an open source web-based database diagramming tool?