Hi, I'm Hong Minhee (洪 民憙), a software engineer in Seoul. I write free and open source software full time, with no company behind me. Most of it is TypeScript, some is Rust, and a good deal is Haskell. The work spans the fediverse, developer libraries, and tools for Korean and other East Asian languages.

Public grants make some of this possible. They're tied to a specific project, though, and they end when the term does. The Sovereign Tech Fund invested €192,000 in Fedify for 2025 and 2026, which pays for that one framework and nothing toward the dozen other libraries people rely on every day. Recurring sponsorship covers the rest. It's what lets me answer issues and ship releases as a job instead of something squeezed in after hours.

Fediverse

Fedify is a framework for building servers that speak ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. ActivityPub looks simple until you implement it. Fedify handles the fiddly, easy-to-break parts, so you build your application and not the plumbing underneath it. Ghost uses Fedify to federate its publishing platform.

Hollo is single-user microblogging software, federated over ActivityPub, for people who want their own instance without running anything heavy. BotKit is a small library for writing fediverse bots. Hackers' Pub is a social network for hackers where posts can also be long-form articles, all federated over ActivityPub.

Developer libraries

LogTape is a logging library with zero dependencies that behaves the same on Deno, Node.js, Bun, browsers, and edge functions. It's the most widely used thing I've made; having no dependencies of its own makes it safe for other libraries to depend on. Optique is a type-safe command-line parser you build up from small composable pieces. Upyo sends email across runtimes over SMTP and the usual providers.

Korean and East Asian languages

Gukhanmun (國漢文) converts Korean mixed script (國漢文混用) to Hangul-only writing (한글전용), as a Rust and TypeScript library and a CLI. Seonbi (선비) is an older Haskell tool in the same vein, handling Korean typography and script conversion inside HTML. This part of my work has the smallest audience and is the part I would least like to give up.

If you use one of these projects, sponsoring helps me keep maintaining it once the grant-funded work runs out. Even a few dollars a month adds up when enough people chip in.