Here is a spotlight on the Shape Builder extension and put out a call for help moving it forward.
What is it? Shape Builder (meshery-extensions/shape-builder) is a Meshery extension that lets anyone visually design custom polygon shapes for use with Kanvas components. Rather than hand-coding coordinate matrices, you draw your shape interactively and the tool outputs the polygon notation that Meshery components understand. It’s a great entry point for contributors who want to extend how infrastructure is visualized in Kanvas.
Where does it stand today? The project has a solid foundation - ~30 contributors and a live deployment. The codebase is primarily JavaScript/CSS, so it’s very approachable for frontend contributors.
Where we need help The extension needs a volunteer (or two!) to step up as contributors, remain consistently engaged as a champion of the project, and actively steward the project on their way to be becoming a maintainer of it:
- Review and merge (or close) the backlog of open PRs
- Triage and prioritize the open issues
- Help drive the next feature iteration
The two most significant open areas of need are:
- Explaining to users how to put to use the output created from the tool. In other words, how to copy the code of their newly designed shape, package and import into Meshery.
- Creating tooling and process for making that process smooth - the process of taking custom output and enhancing the components in the users custom models. If done well, the shape builder could grow into a full-blown Meshery component builder.
If you’re interested in owning a meaningful, standalone piece of the Meshery ecosystem - this is a great opportunity. The scope is focused, the stack is frontend-friendly, and the impact is visible every time a user defines a custom component shape in Kanvas.
Reply here or drop a comment in the repo if you’d like to volunteer. Review the open issues and away you go!
