Appwrite OSS Fund Sponsors LinkFree
Published: 2023-04-20 12:56:22

Hi readers 👋, welcoming you back to the "Appwrite OSS Fund" series, where we celebrate open-source maintainers. 🎉

## 🤔 What Is OSS Fund? 
On the 4th of May, the Appwrite team launched the [OSS Fund](https://appwrite.io/oss-fund), an initiative to support open-source project maintainers. Being an open-source company, we wanted to give back to the community and help as many people as we can. 

The OSS Fund is an initiative that is very close to our heart. 
Hear what our Founder and CEO has to say - The Appwrite Story:
{% embed https://appwrite.io/oss-fund-announcement %}

> ### 📢 Announcing The Fifteenth Project 
> After careful considerations from the committee we are thrilled to announce the fourteenth project:
> {% embed https://twitter.com/appwrite/status/1641440151028269059?s=20 %}

## 🤔 What Is LinkFree?
[LinkFree](https://github.com/EddieHubCommunity/LinkFree) connects to your audience with a single link.  It allows you to showcase the content you create and your projects in one place, making it easier for people to find, follow and subscribe.  

## 🤝 Meet The Maintainer

Eddie is an Open Source fullstack and DevRel expert, with experience in Javascript, Typescript, SQL, NoSQL, automation testing and DevOps. He was also GitHub Star of the Year in 2021, won the GitHub Community Growth Award in 2021 and the GitHub Top Teacher Award in 2023. 
 
With clients ranging from UK Government departments, UK banks, global fintechs and startups, Eddie's experience ranges from large corporate teams to small R&D teams. Eddie has had the opportunity to work with all disciplines in the tech industry; from developers, testers, UX/UI designers, technical writers, to product owners. 
 
Having had the opportunity to learn from so many great colleagues, Eddie has always believed in giving back to the tech community with particular focus on creating and supporting opportunities for those wanting to start a career in tech, through diversity and inclusion programmes. This started out by mentoring and delivering workshops in association with tech for good charities, to creating and building his own community EddieHub

## 💡 How Did The Idea Of LinkFree Come Up?
Eddie was doing one of his regular YouTube livestreams, where he wanted to learn React and have the audience participate and learn along with him. He needed a project idea which would be achievable in the livestream, and he thought about the popular platform "Linktree".  So the aim of the livestream was to build an open source alternative to Linktree. Eddie asked the audience to become involved in this project - by raising pull requests and issues with their ideas. The day after the livestream, he woke up to more pull requests and issues than ever! And that is how LinkFree was born.

## 🚘 The Journey So Far

After the initial livestream where LinkFree was born, and receiving a lot of initial pull requests, community members started creating their LinkFree profiles and sharing this on socials.

Eventually LinkFree outgrew a React only application and as the community was looking to add a backend so that it could support statistics, then moved to NextJS and MongoDB. 

LinkFree started out as the user being able to add their various links to one place, but this evolved to include features such as testimonials, events that one is attending, achievements and future goals, as well as having a generated QR code so that others can more easily discover your profile.  As Eddie and his community have a live map of all LinkFree users, they are slowly moving towards also becoming a social platform.

## 🗒️ Ending Notes

As Eddie continues to build LinkFree for the open source community, we want to thank maintainers like them for contributing back to the community.

If this story resonates with you or your friend, tell them about OSS Fund, as applications are still open:
{% embed https://appwrite.io/oss-fund %}