Open Source by Pieces: Meet the Contributors

In case you missed it, we recently conducted an AMA where we announced the launch of our open-source initiative at Pieces, including the release of the Pieces TypeScript SDK, and launched our dedicated open-source channel on the Pieces Discord server. You can read more about our AMA here!

We conducted our first Open Source by Pieces Meetup on December 2nd, 2023 on our Discord Stage, sharing information on some of our upcoming open-source SDKs and conducting hands-on sessions on how new folks can also contribute to our Open Source initiatives. You can find the recorded session on our YouTube channel.

Here are some of the highlights in case you missed the catchup!

Community Contributions

We discussed the importance of community contributions and the plans to centralize all links and repositories for a smoother collaborative experience. We emphasized the importance of active contributions in making the entire experience better and faster, and encouraged community members to contribute to the ideas on the discussions tab of our OpenSource GitHub Repository to collaborate on planning out these ideas.

Any community members are encouraged to actively participate in the project. This doesn't just mean contributing code; there are many ways to contribute to an open-source project. For example, you can contribute to the discussions on GitHub, which shape the direction of the project, and share your thoughts on why you’d like to see these changes. You can come up with new ideas for features or improvements that you would like to see, or even use! If you just can’t get enough CI/CD, help test new releases and report any bugs you find. You can even help write or translate the documentation.

Upcoming Copilot Example Repo

Build your own copilot application on top of Pieces OS with our new copilot example project. This is a great place to get started with the npm package and can be used to understand some of the API calls that are available around our qGPT model and the future ability to bring your own model. We will be releasing some other articles about this functionality as it is brought more into production.

Hands-On Coding Examples

Start exploring the functionality of our SDKs and dive into our example-ts project for a great starting point for your next big idea. During the livestream, we demonstrated how you could delve into these packages to get examples of how different endpoints function, such as the Search Endpoint or our qGPT endpoints for our copilot chat, directly inside the repository. For our first meetup, we walked through how you could navigate to our Conversations API, which is integral to our contextual copilot, to find examples of how to create conversations from an asset using its ID.

We also showcased how to get back that created conversation ID and use it to propagate questions to our copilot and get information back about a specific asset in your code. This functionality, we explained, is mirrored in Pieces for Developers, and in the future, more documentation and videos will be released on how to translate some of this into TypeScript (and other languages) in future sessions.

The session also highlighted the upcoming full documentation on Stoplight, which will provide comprehensive guides on how to utilize these endpoints.

One of the key features we explored was the 'activities' endpoint. We explained how it provides a full snapshot of all the activities that have taken place on all of your assets, essentially capturing all the events that occur when you use Pieces OS. We demonstrated how you could use this endpoint to pull a full snapshot of your activities, which could include when you save, reference, delete, add to, or manipulate an asset in any way.

Upcoming SDKs

We also invited Tsavo (CEO at Pieces), Mark (CTO at Pieces), and Rutvik (Web Extension Developer at Pieces) to share their thoughts on some of our upcoming open-source SDKs. We are currently working on SDKs for Python, Kotlin, and Dart.

In addition to these SDKs, we also shared our research into incrementally open-sourcing some of our internal plugins. This initiative is part of our commitment to transparency and collaboration. As we continue to uncover more about the reality of open-sourcing specific tooling, we will keep you in the loop.

For now - try out our @pieces-app/pieces-os-client-sdk-for-typescript and check out the power of the endpoints.

Conclusion

The session concluded with an open invitation to the community to contribute to the discussions on GitHub, come up with new ideas, and welcome any first-time Open Source members to the program. We are excited to see what we can accomplish as this large group of developers all work together on these great ideas. Stay tuned for more updates and join us in our journey to make Pieces an indispensable part of the development workflow worldwide.