Almost everything that I love is tied down with Tech, and honestly that sounds kinda boring but for me at least, it's not.
I've been with programming for quite a long time now.
I started when I was in 10th (about 15 years old) with tiny programs in C to teach my younger sister for her computer classes.
Then I got into custom roms for android and built a few roms (pretty lame ones). The journey surprisingly continued to be in my favour as I got my Bachelors in Computers.
Then, decided that the rest I could just learn by myself and, I was both wrong and right.
Wrong, because not everything on the web can replace an actual mentor. A mentor does smoothen out a lot of the issues for you, and this is a gap I still feel exists since most of what I do involves a lot of experimenting with and thus adds on the "time spent to learn" that I could have avoided with a mentor
It has it's own perks as well. You feel like a scientist, cause you are also trying to find solutions to problems you see and don't like the existing solutions since they don't align with your values or you think they can be improved.
I was right, because I got to learn from resources I wouldn't just find in a library. The open source code repositories have been my teacher for the longest time now.
I've talked about me owing to the open source community and why I try to make almost everything I do open source.
But, what is open source?
Seems like a pretty easy question to answer and yet, there's different answers from different people and I just wanna put it out there as to what it means to me right now.
I stress on right now because the perspective for me has changed over time and might keep changing based on how my values for software and programming change.
There's different perspectives and here's a few:
For some the open source is just idiots giving out free software code that they can copy / re-distribute to make their job easier and keep making money out of it.
For others, it's an amazing set of developers who code for the love of coding and they'd like to be one of them
Some love it enough to work on these OSS projects while doing their day job and some have crossed limits in terms of helping the community that they are able to earn off of the donations from their work.
There's a few other perspective and they are all harmless to the OSS developers, just because most of us are busy figuring out fixes and have no time for your judgement
I've mentioned, I think of programming as an art (people on the RSS Feed would know.) and so my stand on this currently is to do it because I love it or something like that but in all honesty it's the only skill that I've spent the most effort improving.
There's no other skill that I'm even half decent at so coding it is.
I can't really say much since I hardly have any experience with sponsors or donations
But, I recently landed on How to Support NetNewsWire. It's what made me draft this post.
It also made me want to delete my sponsors and all the donation links that I've had on my repos. I didn't delete them because, adding sponsors was a decision taken so I could sponsor other devs, the ratio I wanted to maintain was 1:2 or 1:3 but it's 1:5 right now and I think that's fine since I'm not sponsoring huge amounts.
Point being, I'm not putting a price on my own work but trying to make it sustainable for both me and other OSS devs to continue doing what they like doing.
I picked that up from Drew Devault and theres obviously things that we both might not agree on but there are things that do make sense to me and I'd like to act on them when possible.
He does the above with funds collected from SourceHut and his other endeavors, I don't have such an amazing product or idea to help me with it but I've got my day job for now.
If I ever stop working for companies and start freelancing/consulting, I'll have to reevaluate how much of this mentality would still make sense and if I could even move forward with it but that's a problem I can solve when it comes
That's about it for this post, Adios!