###What is Alan? In a world with ever increasing amounts of data creation our ability to sift through it is becoming harder to do. On top of this the need for predictive applications is growing. One need only look to Google Now for this capability. The troubling part of this is that you are not in control of that data. What if there was a way to do that on your own? What if you had an assistant that could anticipate your needs and you owned your data?

Alan seeks to fill that void by creating an application that can run on your own hardware and given inputs predict what you need. Alan seeks to be open source and extensible so that it is easy to create modules to suit your needs. The project plans to make solid core functionality and a flexible platform from which to add your own modules.

###Sounds good but what's the catch? That this isn't going to be a technology that's ready anytime soon and would require lots of man hours to work on. One has to start somewhere though.

###I'm hooked, how can I help? You can send me an email at mgattozzi@gmail.com. I'll be at basic training for a bit so if I don't respond don't dismay. I will get to it eventually. In the meantime if you do work on it be sure to fork the project and send in pull requests for me to review later.

###Technical Details Alan will be written in the D programming language. An up and coming language built to replace such languages as Java and C/C++ with many features built in that make it a language that seeks to undo many common frustrations programmers have.

You can read more about it here.

###Tasks You can see what still needs to be done on the public Trello Board

###Building Alan Make sure you have dub installed. Clone the repository then:

cd Alan
dub

This will get all of the dependencies you need, compile, and run the program. You will need the ldc in order for it to compile, not dmd.