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. For years, i did my best to curate the project, accepting patches and delegating responsibilities When it was time to step back, I archived the project and let one of the project forks take the dominant role. That project was later forked again, and at time of writing Paperless NGX is the major player. I'm still listed as the #4 contributor though ;-)