I want to let you all know to welcome our new full-time developer, @HongDa! He’s been with us for some months on a part time basis, and we recently had some funding that enabled us to employ him on a full time basis.
Hongda is a dedicated Buddhist and an excellent programmer. More than that, he is a delightful and sincere human being, and it’s been a joy to work with him.
He’s working on the front end. He’s currently working on some updates and upgrades to our text pages. We are converting all the site, piece by piece, to an awesome front-end library called LitElement, and along the way taking the opportunity to improve the usability. Our aim is to make the site lighter and faster, to have more flexible functionality with less code.
Many of the changes we’re making a this point are under the hood, so you might not notice them. Some of Hongda’s work, however, you can already see: the addition of titles to the static pages, or having persistent search terms.
The next major step forward will be the adaptation to use the latest translation sources from our new translation editor, Bilara. Hongda will be working on that over the next few months. We can’t wait to show off what we’re building!
One of the projects Anagarika Sabbamitta and I are working on at Voice is integrating bilara-data with Voice. We love the new Bilara data format–it is clean and simple. In fact we are rewriting Voice search entirely to use bilara-data. We’ve created scv-bilara, which is a JavaScript NodeJS library for our use of bilara-data. The scv-bilara library is tuned for searching segmented documents. For example, there are command line tools that support tri-lingual search of bilara-data:
We are currently working on the sc-voice fork of bilara-data. Anagarika Sabbamitta’s German translations of Bhante Sujato’s English translations will appear there and they form the basis for our experiments with tri-lingual search.
Over the next several months we will migrate Voice over to scv-bilara so that we can give Voice users the ability to search the segmented translations for their own language. In addition scv-bilara is faster than the existing Voice server code and will allow Voice to run offline (e.g., on a Raspberry Pi) for remote use. The scv-bilara library is purely back-end, but its capabilities may be of some use to enable front-end features.
We look forward to working with you and are quite excited to meet you. It is good to hear that LitElement is making progress. Voice uses Vuetify/Vue, which is compatible with LitElement. Perhaps we may use one of your LitElements in Voice. And if you need to create a LitElement wrapper for Voice, let us know how we can help.
I hope to see you on Monday at Stanford. It will be good to thank you in person for the gift of your translations. Anagarika Sabbamitta and I have been having great fun working in three languages at the same time. The bilara-data segments are amazingly perfect for multilingual work. Just today I started wondering what a trilingual audio download would sound like. SN12.23 in Pali, English and Deutsch, segment by segment?
We bilara-data.
Have a safe, immersive and comfortable world tour!
Just a quick line to say how true this is! The warmest welcome @HongDa, and thank you so much for all that you bring, not least your bright-hearted kindness.
@sujato, @karl_lew, @Aminah, @ERose, @Gillian
Thank you so much!
My English is not very good, so if I have any inappropriate expression, please forgive me.
Because of my friend’s help and SC team’s gave me this opportunity, I have the honor to join SC team to work for SC, which is consistent with my goal: to benefit from the Buddha’s teaching, and to let more people know this precious teaching. this is also the teaching from the Buddha：
“Ānanda, I say to you:
‘You all should keep up this good practice that I have founded. Do not be my final men.’ Whatever generation is current when such good practice is broken, he is their final man. Ānanda, I say to you: ‘You all should keep up this good practice that I have founded. Do not be my final men.’” --MN.83
Thanks Karl, great to meet you too, thank you for your great work for SC
your work can help others to understand the Buddha’s teachings. thank you for your efforts.
In my previous work experience, I used vue.js, and I’d be happy to help if I could.
Thank you so much for this offer, @HongDa, this is great! We are only such a small team working on Voice: only one developer; one admin who is learning new stuff every day but who would like to focus mostly on translation in the future; and another admin who helped a lot with exploring the world of screen readers and accessibility, and making the most awesome contributions to UI design, but who is also very busy with other tasks for SuttaCentral so that she can’t do much for Voice at the moment—apart from cheering us up, which is of course also most important!
But as you can see, we are proceeding along anyway.
It would be very good to have a Chinese speaker with us, for the time when we feel courageous enough to go towards integrating other root texts than Pali. None of us does understand this language. But this is not yet for now… one step at a time!
@sabbamitta
Thank you so much!!
Thank you for your efforts to spread the Buddha’s teachings.
It is an arduous and great task for people who use different languages to have access to the Buddha’s teachings. I believe that the gradual accumulation of small efforts can bring our goals closer and closer.
bilara-data.
Yay, SuttaCentral team!
