Published on 30 November 2023
A couple of days ago, I wanted a way to open my daily note in Obsidian for tomorrow, the day before. I couldn’t figure out how to do this easily, so I googled a bit and found this plugin. It was easy to install, and did exactly what I wanted, and saved me an hour of figuring out how to do it myself.
Looking at the README, I saw that the owner had a Donating section, where you could buy him a coffee. I thought about the time I saved, thought about the money I would spend on it, and decided - yeah, if I knew this person in real life, I would totally say “My treat” on a daily walk and buy them a coffee for their pains. So I did.
Yesterday, I had the same thing happened. I was using osx-learn, and thinking about how useful it was for teaching my OSX machine to learn new words. I use it all of the time. I know the maintainer - Titus, aka @wooorm - and I wondered how he was doing. I noticed another donate button on his page, using GitHub Sponsors. If I was in Amsterdam with him right now, I would also totally buy him a coffee as a way of thanking him.
So I did. I’m out $8, but I feel better about myself, and I feel like I’ve contributed back a bit more. I don’t do this every day, but it’s one way of giving back to maintainers while also practicing gratefulness, a gift that really gives back to the person who gives it (this is not news).
Who would you buy coffee for, today?
P.S. I’ve since pointed to this blog on fossfunders.com. My company, Burnt Fen Creative LLC (and its subprojects, like Maintainer Mountaineer) has a simple strategy for supporting open source: support maintainers who go out of their way to be nice by donating back to them when you can, what you can. At worst, this is too little and ad hoc; at best, this is more than most.
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