Well, I just jumped full time on IronCalc[1] a fully open source, light and fast spreadsheet engine designed and build from the ground up.
I have been working on it as side project for over two years and now, with funding from the EU for the next 2.5 years, I hope I can make of it a real product for everyone to use that can compete with the likes of Excel and Googl;e Sheets.
I can oly say, I am overly, off the Moon excited
Which EU grant did you receive? Ie. from which fund?
edit: nm, rtfm, it was on the landing page: Horizon Europe programme
Answered to a sibling comment. NLnet and HORIZON.
NLnet is just amazing and can keep you going if you are a student or have some extra sources of income
HORIZON is a huge grant but fairly hard to obtain. Generally related to reasearch grants in academia
Congrats! But what is a spreadsheet "engine" as opposed to a spreadsheet program?
The "engine" is the computational part of it. And it is completely separted from the UI. You can use it from Rust, Python, nodejs or from the browser and eventually from a destop app.
The important thing is that is all those cases the engine is the same. I
Interesting, how was the EU funding process?
First we got a grant from the NLnet[1], which I highly recommend as a first step of any project. Single best thing I could have done. That wasn't enough money for me to quit my job. Also I didn't have any _evidence_ that IronCalc was a good idea or that there was a market for it. Then evidence started pouring and I kept working. I started talking to different folks, lots of people many of those were contacts through the NLnet. Then the folks from NextGraph[2] approached us and asked, "Hey do you want to be part of this consortium [3]?". Eventually we got a HORIZON grant after a lot of sweat and paperwork, but NextGraph took the brunt of it.
As you see there is a huge component of sheer luck
[1]: https://nlnet.nl/project/IronCalc/ [2]: https://nextgraph.org/ [3]: https://elfaconsortium.eu/