Call for Developer Volunteers: Adding FreeStyle Chess Support for Chess Community
Chess has been a popular game for centuries now. It has gone through many revolutions, which has improved the game over these years. Recently, a revolution has started. Championed by Magnus Carlsen and fueled by the recent high-profile "FreeStyle" tournaments, Chess960 (Fisher Random) is taking the world by storm. It strips away memorized opening theory and forces players to think creatively from move one. The chess community is ready for this shift. But the chess developer's community isn't.
Problem Statement
Most of the independent websites, training tools, and apps we love rely on open-source software that was built for the 19th-century version of the game. To make FreeStyle chess accessible to everyone, everywhere, we need to upgrade the foundation of the chess web.
Chess.js is one of the most popular chess libraries. It is authored by Jeff Hlywa, with one of the most permissible license - BSD-2-Clause, which allows it to be freely used by anyone for practically any purpose. 50+ contributors have improved it over time, and it is currently being used by thousands of projects across the globe! It is the foundation for modelling chess games for JavaScript programmers, and is the backbone for validating moves, positions for many independent chess tools out there.
chess.js library on GitHub
We are looking for volunteers to help bring FreeStyle Chess to chess.js!
Task
We are looking for a volunteer with software engineering skills who would like to add the support of Chess960 to chess.js. If you’re someone with good software engineering skills, with a sound understanding of chess, it would be wonderful to have your support! Please reach out to me to discuss this further. Let’s build together!
Github Issue Link: chess960 support · Issue #122 · jhlywa/chess.js
Contact Details
Name | Harsh Kumar |
Github | |
Other Socials (Instagram, Linkedin, etc.) |
Impact
chess.js is used by thousands of independent projects across the globe. Our chess learning platform - ChessRanga.com also relies on chess.js for move validation, and chess logic. Adding support for FreeStyle chess in chess.js will help us support FreeStyle chess in our important products like Tactics Trainer which can be very helpful to the chess community.
Tatics Trainer on ChessRanga, which is dependen on chess.js library
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