Projects /Paperless

When I first moved to the UK, there was a lot of paperwork to deal with. I had to de-register with all of the Dutch authorities, register with the UK authorities and setup a new business as I would be working as a contractor. In the past, my approach to paperwork was to put it in a box and forget it, but suddently people were asking me for copies for various reasons and I spent far too many frustrating hours sifting through dusty folders.

So I did what any other good software engineer would do: I wrote a program to deal with this stuff for me. Based on Python/Django and leveraging industry standard tools like Tesseract for OCR, I wrote Paperless, a Free software tool that anyone can use to set up a local document repository in their home.

The project was posted to Reddit, then to Hackernews, then to Reddit again, and a small community formed around it. I've done my best to curate the project, accepting patches and delegating responsibilities, and currently, I'd say the project is in a stable state.