Intro

As some of you might know I maintain a lot of projects. Any funding via GitHub Sponsors is going to support my work in 3 different areas:

• Ruby linting/formatting/code style/best practices (RuboCop, related Ruby/Rails/RSpec style guides, etc)
• Clojure development tooling/experience (CIDER, Orchard, nREPL, etc)
• Emacs productivity and development experience (Projectile, Emacs Prelude and numerous others)

I typically focus most of my efforts on the first two items of this list these days, but I hope to be able to dedicate more time to my Emacs projects down the road as well.

Why should you support my work?

Being involved in so many projects requires a lot of work and energy. I often spend 20+ hours/week working on my open-source projects or providing support for them. I know a lot of people believe that open-source software creates and maintains itself, but I can assure that's not really the case. It's a lot of blood, sweat, tears and dramas.

A kind word goes a long way, but a bit of money shows your appreciation for someone else's work even more.

Goals

Short-term I'd like to see my current efforts be fairly rewarded, so I'd retain my motivation to work on OSS at the pace I've been doing for the past several years. The thing about OSS is that the more you do, the more you have to do. After a while this starts to take its toll on you...

Long term I'd really love to see more companies supporting my bigger projects like RuboCop and CIDER, as I'm reasonably certain that many companies have benefitted a lot from them, while I've earned next to nothing in the process. It's not crazy to assume that some companies might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a month for tools that would make their teams more productive, right?

I dream of the day where a couple of dozen of mid-sized "corporate" sponsors would allow me to focus full-time on creating developer productivity tools, but seeing how little most companies care about OSS I don't see it happening any time soon.

Hopefully GitHub Sponsors will change this!