A tiny donation to rubyland.news would mean a lot

I started rubyland.news in 2016 because it was a thing I wanted to see for the ruby community. I had been feeling a shrinking of the ruby open source collaborative community, it felt like the room was emptying out.

If you find value in Rubyland News, just a few dollars contribution on my Github Sponsors page would be so appreciated.

I wanted to make people writing about ruby and what they were doing with it visible to each other and to the community, in order to try to (re)build/preserve/strengthen a self-conception as a community, connect people to each other, provide entry to newcomers, and just make it easier to find ruby news.

I’ve been solely responsible for its development, and editorial and technical operations. I think it’s been a success. I don’t have analytics, but it seems to be somewhat known and used.

Rubyland.news has never been a commercial project. I have never tried to “monetize” it. I don’t even really highlight my personal involvement much. I have in the past occasionally had modest paid sponsorship barely enough to cover expenses, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

I have and would never provide any kind of paid content placement, because I think that would be counter to my aims and values — I have had offers, specifically asking for paid placement not labelled as such, because apparently this is how the world works now, but I would consider that an unethical violation of trust.

It’s purely a labor or love, in attempted service to the ruby community, building what I want to see in the world as an offering of mutual aid.

So why am I asking for money?

The operations of Rubyland News don’t cost much, but they do cost something. A bit more since Heroku eliminated free dynos.

I currently pay for it out of my pocket, and mostly always have modulo occasional periods of tiny sponsorship. My pockets are doing just fine, but I do work for an academic non-profit, so despite being a software engineer the modest expenses are noticeable.

Sure, I could run it somewhere cheaper than heroku (and eventually might have to) — but I’m doing all this in my spare time, I don’t want to spend an iota more time or psychic energy on (to me) boring operational concerns than I need to. (But if you want to volunteer to take care of setting up, managing, and paying for deployment and operations on another platform, get in touch! Or if you are another platform that wants to host rubyland news for free!)

It would be nice to not have to pay for Rubyland News out of my pocket. But also, some donations would, as much as be monetarily helpful, also help motivate me to keep putting energy into this, showing me that the project really does have value to the community.

I’m not looking to make serious cash here. If I were able to get just $20-$40/month in donations, that would about pay my expenses (after taxes, cause I’d declare if i were getting that much), I’d be overjoyed. Even 5 monthly sustainers at just $1 would really mean a lot to me, as a demonstration of support.

You can donate one-time or monthly on my Github Sponsors page. The suggested levels are $1 and $5.

(If you don’t want to donate or can’t spare the cash, but do want to send me an email telling me about your use of rubyland news, I would love that too! I really don’t get much feedback! jonathan at rubyland.news)

Thanks

• Thanks to anyone who donates anything at all
• also to anyone who sends me a note to tell me that they value Rubyland News (seriously, I get virtually no feedback — telling me things you’d like to be better/different is seriously appreciated too! Or things you like about how it is now. I do this to serve the community, and appreciate feedback and suggestions!)
• To anyone who reads Rubyland News at all
• To anyone who blogs about ruby, especially if you have an RSS feed, especially if you are doing it as a hobbyist/community-member for purposes other than business leads!
• To my current single monthly github sponsor, for $1, who shall remain unnamed because they listed their sponsorship as private
• To anyone contributing in their own way to any part of open source communities for reasons other than profit, sometimes without much recognition, to help create free culture that isn’t just about exploiting each other!