First Ever Donation

• Gatsby
• Gatsby Plugins
• MDX

I’ve been at the Open Source thing for a while now and never really intended it to be a way to make a living but…

On all of my GitHub projects i have been adding a link to my Ko-fi page at the bottom of the README.

To my delight late last night i received a notification that @richburroughs had made not one, not two but THREE donations… totalling £9 🎉

I know it doesn’t sound like much but if we look past the financial quantity it’s actually a pretty huge deal. So many companies and individuals (myself included) freely use open source projects. Many never give back. I’ve worked at a few places where their company policy was to not allow developers to work on anything that’s not a company product. It’s just my opinion but this is soooo bad.

In the JavaScript realm pretty much any thing you install and even the method you use to install it, npm / yarn are open source projects and not allowing your employees to contribute on company time to the projects that are somewhat responsible for how the company makes money really bothers me!

These open source projects are typically created and maintained by individuals such as myself who aren’t necessarily seeking financial remuneration for their efforts but… it’s so awesome when someone recognizes that you are effectively using another persons work for free and makes a donation.

The contribution was made to one of my Gatsby plugins gatsby-mdx-embed which provides plug-and-play support for embedding 3rd party media content such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and many more into your Gatsby blog posts.

The plugin is used by a growing number of Gatsby users and took me a couple of weeks to develop with smaller amounts of time for updates here and there. It’s not a huge amount of time to spend doing something you love but a small donation for my efforts says so much more that it’s quantitative value.

… and to that end thank you Rich Burroughs and thank you FireHydrant you’ve absolutely made my day!