At the very top of this, I want to be clear about exactly what this GitHub Sponsors isn't. First, it isn't a way for me to sustain my life. Financially I'm okay at the moment — I'm in a stable job that pays well, and am not struggling to put food on the table. Students and others with limited discretionary spending capabilities, please do not send me money! There is a reason why the lowest tier is set at a (relatively speaking) high price point. And second, this GitHub Sponsors isn't really focused on rewards. Some of the tiers have rewards, but those aren't truly commensurate with their price. Instead, the main driving factor here (I hope) is to give back for the value you've derived from what I've made in the past, and to contribute towards me continuing to make things in the future.

You can see more details about the ins and outs of sponsorships, about what I work on, and about the different tiers in the #doorstep channel on my Discord. Reach out there or by email if you're a larger company looking for invoiced tiers.

With that out of the way, here are some of the things I've made, and where I can see them going:

Educational Rust videos: I do live-streams (which all go up for free on YouTube afterwards) that cover various aspects of the Rust programming language. These include long (6+ hours) programming sessions where we build "something real", medium-length (2-3 hours) lecture-style videos , and very short (~30s) tip-of-the-day videos. I currently aim for one video a month (streaming calendar), though I wish I had time for significantly more. I also want to develop an actual Rust lecture series/course, though that one is even further out as things currently stand.

Rust for Rustaceans: I wrote Rust for Rustaceans, an intermediate-level Rust book that covers a lot of the topics that go beyond the original Rust book but are still critical when developing large-scale, real-world, production applications. I'd love to give the book a second edition one day, but that would take a lot of time and effort. I've also played around with the idea of making an audio book version, of releasing a sort of "author's commentary", and potentially even of opening up part of the book. All of that is on the backlog for the time being.

Missing Semester: Along with two labmates of mine from MIT, I developed the Missing Semester course, which is a series of lectures that cover a wide variety of highly practical skills and tools that engineers are rarely taught directly in school even though they are (in our minds) critical to have in your toolbelt. Students are often expected to pick these up as they go, but will often fail to learn them properly, leading to suboptimal use and confusion, or fail to discover them at all! We developed Missing Semester a few years ago now, and I'd love to update some of the lectures and record new ones, but alas.

Rustacean Station: Back in 2019, Ben and I started the podcast Rustacean Station. We started it to be not just our own podcast, but rather one for the Rust community, where anyone with a Rust-related podcast idea could record and episode and we'd take care of the publishing part. Since then, Ben and I have recorded regular episodes about what's new in new Rust releases, and Allen Wyma has taken on a series of interviews with people and companies using Rust for interesting things. I have a number of episodes I'd like to record, but sadly not enough spare time in which to do so. I even have an idea for a completely new podcast that's not directly Rust related where I chat to people who build the technology that's all around us and that we've mostly forgotten is even there, but that's mostly a pipe dream for now.

Rust crates and tools: I've built a number of fully open-source Rust projects that are by now fairly widely used (>200 downloads a day). hdrhistogram allows efficient recording and storage of histogram data. inferno draws flame graphs in pure Rust (and underpins cargo-flamegraph). fantoccini implements the WebDriver protocol for browser control. flurry is a concurrent hash map modeled after Java's ConcurrentHashMap. imap is a Rust implementation of the IMAP protocol. Many of these have open issues, features, and needed infrastructure improvements that I should really get to, but with time stretched as thin as it is, keeping up with them all isn't feasible. Where I can I've tried to delegate maintainer tasks to others, but good maintainers with time on their hands is a scarce resource.