these tend to come off like humble brags a bit considering working on the right thing at the right time is a big factor
Believing that everything is just luck is a great way to make sure you never encounter any.
didnt say everything
I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
411–420 of 510 posts
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#412Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sp…
You live in a welfare state...
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#413Congrats dude! Living the dream!
Been following you and your progress on twitter for a while
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
"For each donated dollar, I will create and send you 100 random bytes that you can use in your cryptographic applications." $7 = 700 random bytes $15 = 1500 random bytes + 500 bytes free! $99 = lifetime* subscription for 25k random bytes per year * your lifetime or my lifetime, whichever terminates earlier
Do you have any collectible limited edition bytes?
How about The Original: 00000000
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess never really analyzed it in depth and just had both. What does E&O miss that a single member LLC protects against (and vice versa)?
LLC[1] mostly does what it says on the tin: it limits the liability to the company, not yourself or other owners. Without this any debt or judgement against your company can consume potentially most of your net worth (subject to bankrupcy, etc.). In practice for a freelancer this means you can limit your liability pretty strongly, if you are passing everything through as payroll the asset value of your company can be…
Oh contract terms! I completely forgot, you’re right. I’m actually pretty happy with my final retainer contract. It limited damages to the last three months of retainer spend.
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get a good accountant. They are seriously worth it.
This advice is invaluable. I only pay my accountant around $2000 to handle a bunch of housekeeping at the end of the year that I'm to lazy to do during, and to file my taxes. For years I did my own taxes using Turbo Tax Self Employed and Turbo Tax Business Editions, but in 2016 I decided to outsource all of that headache, the first year, my taxes were half of what they were the year before with similar income. Then a…
I hear this advice a lot, but what does an accountant actually do differently? It always sounds magical. Are there super secret deductions and credits that aren't on Turbo Tax, and only accountants know about?
I feel like I'm doing 90% of the work already, having organized all my expenses and income. What are they doing other than typing it into their own Turbo-Tax-equivalent?
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#417Joel Spolsky does a good job of explaining what's actually happening here in his old "Strategy Letter V" from 2002 [1].
Caleb hasn't discovered some secret means of convincing people to pay for OSS they can download for free. What he's done is create a commodity (the open source package) and then once it's popular, make a tidy profit off its complimentary product (training videos).
Unfortunately it's still true that people generally won't pay for software they can download for free, but if you're willing to dip into some other types of work (e.g. consulting, creating training videos) then you can make more than enough profit top keep going indefinitely.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest difference would be that GitHub Sponsors has no fees [1], so everything people put in will go to the developer. Where Patreon can take 5-12% depending on the plan [2]. Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product. As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime. [1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-o…
That's what I was surprised the most about. 0% cut and they also mentioned a 5k match? What? How is that even viable for Microsoft? That seems superior to basically every single platform out there. It's an instant win for GitHub Sponsors.
Microsoft has such deep pockets, they can probably afford to lose a bit here to get people to migrate to their platform.
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#419Coil and Mozilla are working on something very similar to sponsorship but instead with micropayments that are streamed to content creator's wallets via a new open Web Monetization standard. https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started.html
Would be neat to see more sites adopt the web monetization standard via coil or other sites like it that enable content creators to offer paid content and get paid passively as more people discovered their content.
Re: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
#420I hate sponsorware concept OP is proposing. It seems to work for him but it’s opposite to the spirit of open source. His idea is that keep code secret until you find N sponsors. Further, he will hide important tutorials if you are not sponsor. I would hate to use this kind of open source project. Here is more viable freelancing: - create framework/library that everyone needs - for feature requests/bug fixes, prioriti…
While the term open-source is a bit more vague, I'd argue that the software he's developing fits squarely into the term "free" (as in speech), as the FSF defines it. The source code is available to modify and fork, even if you must pay to access it -- which is allowed while still considering it "Free". I've always wondered how the FSF thought that would work exactly, since it seems weird to have something be forkable to only a select group of people, but this makes a lot of sense; it will be open sourced to everyone after enough people pay for it.
I'd also argue that this is one of the most ethical ways to pay developers fairly for their work, even if the author wasn't able to make that much money from it. The product the developer creates is FOSS, available to everyone after some time, and they still get paid for it (bonus; they're paid by the open source community for their work, rather than from one person/corporation that dictates their salary).