Donate
Let’s face it, we all need to eat. We all have bills. And we all want to treat ourselves every once in a while. 🙂
If I’ve ever written a piece of software, no matter how big or tiny, and you find it useful enough that you use it, how about showing your appreciation with a donation? It would be greatly appreciated by me, and helps to encourage me to either continue updating the software with bug fixes and/or new feature enhancements, as well as to write any new software to put out into the universe!
I feel it’s important to note, that in most cases, the donations are for all work of my own, from scratch, start to finish, from:
- Conjuring up the concept
- To working out the ‘how can I get this done?’
- To researching the problems
- To often having to study and learn new solutions, sometimes including entirely new programming languages (not unlike only knowing English, and then having to learn Chinese from scratch!)
- To interacting with other developers whom may be able to help along the way
- To “gettin er’ done”
- To packaging it all up in a nice, pretty, user-friendly way
- To putting it out there in all the right places, so you can get it
- To maintaining it once it’s released to the wild, in all of the ways mentioned above
- To paying for all of this out of my own pocket to host these sites
- To interacting with you , my dear users 🙂 (and let’s face it, anyone who’s worked a job interacting with the public knows that’s not always easy! :p )
- And much more. Developing software is an art, and not nearly as easy as it may appear!
And with that said, once in a while I’ll write some software that is what is called a ‘wrapper’; which (usually) means it is a sort of ‘helper’ or ‘companion’ app for another piece of software, often written by someone else. Think, a graphical interface for a command-line utility, to add all of the nice, easy clicking that most of us much prefer to arcane command-lines, or perhaps a browser extension that wraps around a piece of software written by someone else (such as my Organizr Viewer Chrome extension for example, built around the excellent Organizr web app).
In these cases, the amount of work is often the same as the list above, albeit to a lesser extent since I didn’t write the code it’s wrapping around, but often the wrapper itself is an equal amount of work. In those cases, I look at the donations as showing appreciation and support for my time and work into the wrapper itself, and make zero claims of my work going into the program my work is wrapping around. If the app being wrapped’s author also requests donations for their work, I highly recommend doing so as well! They deserve it! And let’s face it, I don’t waste my time writing wrappers based on anything but the best apps! 🙂
In these cases, if I’m able to find some sort of donation link for the app I’m writing mine around, I’ll add a link here for it as well. Please donate to both if you can, since we’re completely different people, who often aren’t even in communication with each other, but we’re both spending our time for you! 🙂
Any type of donation type from the list is great, take your pick, it all matters! And every penny is appreciated more than you know!
Thank you in advance,
- J. SCOTT ELBLEIN