Free resources to build your next Open Source project
Building CityMatrp 2.0
CityMatrp is a Mobile Route Management System aiming to avail information about matatus, connections, routes, online route maps for free. CityMatrp users are able to know where to find the bus stations to their various destinations within Nairobi.
In the coming weeks I will be building CityMatrp V2.0. These are some free resources to help me and you start working on our next Open Source project (or side project) in 2017.
- Creating the product vision and roadmap
Every OSS project needs some level of organization. This helps people understand why you are building the software and helps in on-boarding other developers interested in joining the project. When accessing for the tools to help with this, take into consideration; one, ease of use. Two, it should be publicly accessible by everyone.
Tool — Trello
Example — CityMatrp 2.0
Cost — 0/=
2. Development of the Env
You all have a preferred IDE or text editor that you use for your daily development. Cloud 9 allows you to take your development environment to the cloud and hooks you up with a powerful online IDE and a VPS for hosting and running you projects. You can easily provision your development environment in the cloud for any stack LAMP, NodeJS, Django etc. in clickable steps. In addition to this awesomeness it allows for collaboration at the code level for remote teams. Working on projects have never been this easy.
Tool — Cloud 9
Cost — 0/=
3. Hosting
Okay, all real geeks should avoid shared hosting. Simple with all the option that exists today I just don’t get why use shared hosting. We have a range of options here so I am just going to list them down and highlight my preferred option, Heroku. Heroku is a PaaS, which means it provides you with a platform to run your project without ever worrying about server configurations or server security (This ofcourse is the high level definition).
Tools — Heroku
Cost — 0/=
Options
Digital Ocean — Get $10 credit using this link
Azure free option — Get $25 free monthly credits on Azure by downloading Visual Studio Link
4. Domain names
Now you have built your application and feel ready to share it with the rest of the internet. Good job! You can get free domains from the guys at freenom.com. I just love this people, they also provide you with cheap .com domain if you want. Be sure to check the out!
Tool — Freenom link
Cost — 0/=
5. SSL Certificates
It is 2017 and https:// is becoming the new normal, Google announced it will start flagging all http:// sites that collect passwords from user as insecure starting 2017. Well, get yourself a free SSL certificate for your site at Let’s Encrypt.
Tool — Let’s Encrypt
Quick setup instructions using CertBot
Cost — 0/=
6. Monitoring
This is important in making sure your project is always up and running. The tool to use here is highly dependent on the hosting option you chose for your project. So, I will just highlight my preferred option, NodeQuery. NodeQuery provides a lightweight and easy to use Linux server monitoring service.
Tool — NodeQuery
Cost — 0/=
As you can see the total cost required to build your next project can be ZERO, so you don’t have to wait any longer to get started. SO BUILD THE THING!!!
A few weeks ago I released CityMatrp V1.0, a project I did in my second year of my degree program, the post received over 300 LinkedIn views (my posts always averaged between 40–60 views). A number of people also contacted me via email asking about the project.
This Interest encouraged me to resume working on the project. So in the coming weeks I will start a series called “Building CityMatrp 2.0” where I will be sharing the progress, lessons, challenges and resources used in the building the project.
This is the first post of the series “Building CityMatrp 2.0”
Next post is on the way 
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