It's interesting to see some people are making it work living off these types of projects.
> I created a Patreon back in April of 2019. I felt a bit silly at the time, with thoughts like “who do I think I am” and “what am I even doing” echoing in my head. I still did it though. I was too curious to see what would happen, even though I expected nothing. Amazingly, a couple of people actually signed up!
I'm definitely relating to this experience. Feels hella pretentious and weird to set up donations. Was likewise surprised to actually get people sending me money. I guess the moral of the story is if you build cool things, people are willing to chip in.
> I guess the moral of the story is if you build cool things, people are willing to chip in.
I wouldn't agree with the statement entirely. There are people who were building cools things, but getting support has been hard for many of them. Specially in the early 2000s, open source felt like a very personal battle to build cool stuff, where people with sheer will and luck survived. Now, OSS developers like Andreas thrive and grow because of community support.
In the last few years, Open Source went through a cultural shift that enabled people to ask for support openly. You know the human behind the work, not an organization. You have Andrew Kelly of Zig, Evan You of Vue and many more who are not organizations but individuals making contributions. It is a radical change.
We have also seen a radical change in sentiment that all developers are bounded by some moral internal code to support OSS projects, whether it be through code, answering Stack Overflow questions or through donations.
Another aspect is that, code streaming and creating community chatroom has enabled many developers to share their ideas openly and create microcosms of spaces where communities can form. These communities are sources of support in the form of development, spiritual support and income.
It is not entirely about cool things anymore. It is more than that. We probably are living in the golden age of Open Source development.
What you mentioned about community got me thinking how closely related it is to regular "content creators" that create content for a community (e.g. on Twitch or Youtube) and get financial support from that community.
In other words: would we be seeing a similar level of donations for makers and hackers if the gaming/just chatting streamers hadn't paved the way?
that is a very interesting perspective. i hadn't thought about that before. but you are right that in the last few years a greater attention has been given to the need to support developers who are working on critical infrastructure, and while SerenityOS may not be critical to the majority of FOSS users in general, it certainly is important to its own users.
I've been wondering for a while if these successful developers who use Patreon had hosted their own payment page with Stripe would they have received same success?
Does 'Support me on Patreon' add more legibility than 'Support me on my x website' to a potential donor?
Because, Its trivial for a developer to integrate Stripe or any other PG on their website & they can stop paying double commissions on Patreon; Besides no vendor lock-in, censorship or payment delays.
I'm not super familiar with the pros/cons of all the options, but the 10,000 foot view AFAIK is that Patreon has a big advantage for people who want to give small monthly amounts to many people, as they can minimize the number of individual transactions, increasing efficiency (even after they take their cut).
If you only support one or two people or you give larger monthly amounts, having Stripe or whatever set-up would be better - I think it's more about creating an atmosphere where it's encouraged to give relatively small fiscal amounts (a couple dollars a month) to many people.
You make a good point, Someone who donates to you regularly likely does so for few others and a single payment system for them could be useful; Even though the heavy lifting is done by Stripe for this case too.
Amanda Palmer is easily seen through her own actions as a selfish, out of touch and pretentious to the point of deserving banishment to a deserted island a la Napoleon, but she has Neil Gaiman’s ring and bank account so they both get to live in their own reality / cesspool.
A rich person offering to pay you in hugs for your artistic performance skills is disgusting on a base level. It just is, and that’s her best claim to fame.
Definition of donation
: the act or an instance of donating: such as
a : the making of a gift especially to a charity or public institution
b : a free contribution : gift
Germany, IANAL but was curious because I've seen it differently here: "donations" that are clearly not tax deductible, the only real test for that wird in some sense.
Lawyer Google tells me donations are just money gifts. Some organizations that are approved can hand you a recipe that allows you to tax deduct it. And I think those organizations also don't need to pay taxes on it.
TIL. Not sure how well that resonates in Sweden though.
In the US a 501(c)(3) organization is considered "non-profit" and gifts to them are tax-deductible. I worked at one once and we had a paper we used at stores to pay no sales tax.
You are correct on both points, but you're drawing a connection where one doesn't necessarily exist.
When you donate to 501(c)(3) corporation, you can deduct the donation against your taxes and the organization does not have to pay taxes on your gift.
The paper you show the store is either a "tax exempt" certificate or a reseller certificate. In the case of your non-profit, it's probably a tax-exempt certificate, but other types of businesses can avoid paying sales taxes on items they purchase if they are for resale.
I know this may seem overly pedantic, but taxes are an area where there is a lot of misinformation online, so I'm trying to help reduce any confusion the post may have cuased.
Correct, it was a tax exempt certificate. I wasn't trying to say they were related, but I can see how that would have been implied from the text. Thanks for the clarification!
I think you might be reading the sentence the wrong way round, to me it sounds like the author talks about others making donations, not him receiving them.
I think you missed some of his comment. He wrote, "Was likewise surprised to actually get people sending me money." That is him discussing his receipt of monies.
Ah, Andreas YT programming sessions. The length, the sincerity, the mood. The way he is able to communicate with us while being alone in a room. His very conscious effort to not get side tracked. And, of course, him just being a really effective programmer, while not being flashy or pretentious about tech or tooling in the least (and also probably because of it).
Sometimes I watch and listen intently, and learn a lot. Sometimes I zone a little. It's perfect. If you are interested in programming in general I can just highly recommend checking it out.
For someone who has heard about Andreas and SerenityOS on occasion but has never actually seen one of his livestreams, where do you suggest I start? Any special episode recommendations? Don’t see myself catching up with all of his videos, haha.
You don`t have to "catch up" per se. You will get into it by just watching some bits here and there.
Open his youtube channel [0] and pick a video that has a title that seems interesting.
If you want to get the latest about SerenityOS, he does this "Office Hours" thing live every friday. Which might be the answer you are looking for.
I had never seen any of his videos, nor followed SerenityOS. Regardless, I found this one "Browser hacking: A most satisfying refactor to hide constructors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5799GySdWqY interesting and relateable enough to watch to the end.
I've never had time to watch the YTs, I just recall them being "I build a filesystem in 45 minutes" or something like that, where the resulting code can't possibly be anything close to a production OS with all the error codes and wrinkles properly handled, to say nothing of documentation and test batteries.
Is Serenity OS a bunch of parlor tricks, and is it a UNIX reimpl, or is there anything interesting in the underlying OS design (micro vs macrokernel, userspace vs kernelspace, everything-is-a-file-Plan9, shell design, etc)?
the videos are all fairly self contained. usually limited to trying to fix a specific bug, or implement a specific feature. the livestreams are just q&a, focused on (but not exclusive to) technical questions.
just pick something that sounds interesting, basically. there's no need to have watched prior videos to understand what's going on, generally. Either way, most of the code encountered in the video will mostly have been written without being recorded
Thank you for sharing Andreas! It's absolutely phenomenal how far along SerenityOS has come and it's also a peek at how FOSS is supposed to be - a way to learn, hack on something fun, share it with others but without any huge expectations.
Building the next unicorn is awesome and all but in my opinion, this has it's own place. I am glad some people out there get to work on their dream projects and actually can make a living out it. Kudos to all the supporters, obviously.
I also love how focused SerenityOS is and what kind of audience it caters to. Some people might say, "make it for everyone" but that doesn't work most of the time. Having a focused audience allows a lot of freedom in the way of UX/DX, docs, communication etc. So I am glad Andreas set that down upfront.
This is the thing that confused me. What exactly is the audience for this? It seems like more of an intricate art project than a useful piece of software.
Maybe it will also be useful some day, maybe not, but to me at least that's not the point. It's really cool that we can fund some art projects like this in the software industry!
Not a perfect comparison, but it's like how some people approach math simply for the beauty of it. That's enough of a reason! And sometimes that math ends up useful too - maybe because math has a connection to reality. So does software - it runs.
The audience is the people who contribute to the art project and want to be part of the community. A community that serves itself for no other reason than to serve itself. Seems like a good time to me
This has educational value. If you are wondering "how this part of OS would be implemented" you can look up how Serenity team did that. Also even more interesting is trying to implement this for yourself (for Serenity), if you are brave enough.
Well, more or less, at the moment it’s for fun and art. It’s recreational. Odd thing is that SerenityOS has made so much progress so quickly that it may soon be a viable daily-use operating system.
It has a nice consistent ui toolkit that seems highly productive. I hope the user-space (window manager, default apps) eventually becomes an alternative linux user-space.
The audience is hackers as it should be. You can't cater to daily users at this stage. You want people who can potentially fix the bugs they come across or add the features they miss. A usable OS is no joke and it certainly isn't a one man project. If enough people get on this, it might actually become daily-usable.
I was wondering the same. Nothing against the project, but from reading about it I’m confused why I would choose this over my preferred OS (and therefore how it makes enough money).
But then again there are so many distros it’s not that surprising.
It continues to baffle me how a newsboard called hackernews has countless people who are incapable of seeing the value in making something for the sake of making it.
This is awesome and I'm confident SerenityOS and all its related projects (eg Ladybird) will only grow in popularity over time.
Andreas will eventually most definitely get a salary closer to what he could get elsewhere and in the meantime he doesn't have to compromise on his mental health by working for a company that forces him to write bad software on purpose.
It's a pretty sweet deal, and it's a shame only few of us have a chance to experience this.
Andreas started this project to keep himself busy out of rehab for drug abuse. I did something similar out of rehab for alcohol. He named it Serenity OS from the Serenity Prayer for this reason. Being responsible and earning income to support your family is an important part of recovery. Beyond that, he's doing it for spiritual reasons. Sometimes the most debilitating feature of addiction is isolation and loneliness. He's created a community that is warm and friendly.
I think what he's done is amazing for these reasons:
He's created a viable operating system with hundreds of contributers
He's supporting his family
He's got himself well out of isolation with a big community of people
Edit: forgot one. He's staying sober
/g/ is a board on 4chan for discussing technology. 4chan is a loosely-moderated website where you can discuss things anonymously. It's unpleasant, would not recommend.
It has a certain allure and acceptance for fringe modes of thought that keeps people around.
I myself started browsing in high-school and haven't been able to stop since -- I can probably attribute the development of my entire engineering philosophy to the place.
Nice! I didn't knew about that. Can you elaborate on this?
I still mourn Terry Davis passing.I really enjoyed seeing him work on his Operating System and I was really saddened when his mental condition deteriorated to the point he got homeless, ultimately ending his life. With meds, he'd still be here and kicking :-(
Those of you using Serenity OS: this is an amazing value, and an incredible talent you have there. Consider contributing, even if only once. The market price for talent like that, if realistically priced, would be about 5 times what he’s earning.
Some senior engineers at big tech companies make more than a million US per year, so someone with an excellent diverse C++ skill set and an entrepreneurial bent could well make much more than that.
I don’t know about much more. The last time I saw the top ends of Google’s IC pay scale, it was ~$1.5 million TC, and that was for, like, two people.
I’m being nit picky. But big tech isn’t THAT insane. 7 figure TC is incredibly, incredibly rare. It’s not just “senior engineer”, it’s “senior senior senior senior” or more.
HFT firms require lots of domain knowledge on top of “just” C++. Those quants are elite mathematicians and highly knowledgeable in finance in addition to being great at C++ (or OCaml).
I would say that C++ expertise is often actually “underpaid” compared to its level of difficult. If you’re doing OS stuff in C++ you’re working on something embedded. If you’re doing embedded, you’re probably selling hardware, which has low margins (compared to pure software plays). Meanwhile a Ruby on Rails dev who can iterate their web app quickly can start getting PMF and basically print money.
It may well be underpaid compared to it's difficulty level, but the jobs exist.
Meanwhile I've yet to see a Rails job that pays enough to be worth my while, despite Ruby being by far my favourite language.
I get to use Ruby a lot (rarely Rails; don't like the thing), but because I am typically in senior enough positions to have autonomy in what I choose for my projects - the moment a job is advertised as a Rails job, the pay is accordingly low.
That's surprising for me to hear (as a non-Ruby/Rails guy that doesn't know that sub-market), given how many massively successful startups were built on Rails. I get that Rails isn't the hot new thing anymore, but Airbnb pays quite well and still uses it, right?
Are there just tons of smaller fish paying peanuts?
It's worth adding to this I've been developing software professionally for 27 years, so there being few Rails jobs meeting my expectations does not mean there aren't well paid Rails jobs.
But Rails does best in a chunk of what used to be the PHP market for quick and dirty websites. Once companies scale, only a relatively small portion of their dev work tends to be Rails related, and not the most interesting/best paid parts of their dev work.
The roles you can use Ruby in are wider and there is some juicier stuff there, but most of that isn't advertised as Ruby. E.g. in a lot of devops roles you may come across quite a bit of Ruby tooling.
One aspect worth pointing out is how much more difficult this would be without public health care. It’s doable sure, but you’d need to either get insurance from a spouse, buy your own healthcare (expensive) or rely on free insurance (very low quality and poor coverage).
Fun fact: I was super nervous to interview Andreas. I knew the way to really understand the backstory of Serenity was to ask Andreas about directly about his early days of recovery.
It felt invasive, but Andreas just shared and shared. Amazing person and his youtube car videos are so good and raw and honest.
We also actually spent sometime playing around with Serenity and that was fun (and was never released).
But yeah, I love the boldness of just starting to build something, taking a step in the direction and not worrying that it seems so large.
This inspiring dude is does awesome projects. I am not a regular donor, but every time I see him working in something, I do it.
It also makes me happy to know that he is Swedish, a country that I love very much.
There would seem to be great uncertainty in how much money
he will make per month.
He does have multiple income streams which is great, but none
of them fixed (I think).
I was a freelance / independent developer for a while, but I worried
far too much about not having work that I wanted to have multiple
projects going at the same time in case one got cancelled / ended.
However, they all kept getting extended, which was good but also bad.
I was working on 3 contracts concurrently.
working from home and working 95% of the day I managed to
to keep then all happy, but it was taking a toll with
stress and no life outside of work.
I was making good money. Yet I was too risk adverse.
Once they had all finished, I ran to a corporate job again.
(which meant turning down several contracts offered)
I think most people on HN are a lot better at handling
being a freelancer and being independent.
it's part personality and attitude and part skill and planning.
(and for me, coming from a country with a strong social support net helps with the attitude at least)
the personality/attitude part for me is, that i grew up with the assurance that no matter how bad it gets, i will always have a safe place to live and enough food to eat. so i am not worried when i am not making money.
this obviously is more difficult in a country where such support doesn't exist. but the skill and planing part applies everywhere. i currently have a financial buffer of more than a year. i have had it for a while, and it's not shrinking. that means i am earning enough each month to cover my expenses. should i stop earning anything, then i'd still have more than a years time to find something new before things get dire. though if possible, now that i have this buffer, i want to try to keep it. if i dip below a years worth of savings, then i want to focus on earning more in order to refill the buffer.
Andreas, this is pretty cool. Do you think it may be plausible at some point that you do you development and make your YT screencasts (not necessarily the recodings itself, but the desktop/software used there) from inside SerenityOS?
I've been following Serenity for a while. Thanks for your educational expertise humbly conveyed in your videos!
Could it be beneficial for your company to be set up as a foundation? Since it is not "selling" Serenity, merely taking donations anyhow? I don't know the Swedish system but I wonder if that could provide tax advantages to donors and workers?
If you have your own companies, you can pay yourself Director's dividends instead of being employed and drawing a salary. Again depending on the country, that may be advantageous - tax-wise, and also not having to do payroll.
Don't forget the US has federal income tax (even if you only make $30k/yr); Washington doesn't have an income tax but has all sorts of sales tax, and then of course there's the matter of health insurance costs. Choose the wrong plan in the US and get into a car crash through no fault of your own, and suddenly you're declaring medical bankruptcy on minimum wage. How many days of PTO and sick leave is that minimum wage job giving? Is the workplace unionized? How much is rent for that matter? Did you get housing in, say, Sthlm by waiting in line or did you use one of the loopholes? How much does food cost, in the grocery store, eating out, and food delivery. How easy is it to recycle?
There's a lot more thought that should go into a consideration when choosing between two places to live. A simple dollars to SEK comparison doesn't begin to scratch the surface of it.
> (after tax I presume that's about $2000 / month).
No OECD country has a total tax wedge (including employers payroll taxes, which may be relevant here since he's running a company) above 50% for an average salary other than Belgium.
Sweden is at ca 42% vs ca 28% in the US.
Which is of course high, but e.g. effectively includes full health cover etc..
(For comparison, income tax and employee contributions average at ca 24% of an average salary both places)
That's more than enough unless he lives in a big city. At one point I even bought a waterfront apartment walking distance from downtown in a medium sized city making a bit less than him. Things are pretty affordable here. The taxes thing is just FUD/propaganda. (Well, ignoring the energy crisis that might be about to hit us hard that is.)
Dunno, I still think it can be characterized as the low-end of average, even if it's closer to 2-3 years of experience. Maybe not in Stockholm, but there are a places that still offer like 30k for entry level hires.
As written in the article talking salaries in Sweden is avoided, so there are probably many offers in that range.
The recommendation is for Sweden in general though, not Stockholm. It is for any kind of engineer, where IT is above average.
What are you referring to in the article? All taxable income (which would include salary) is public information in Sweden and the majority are unionized and do talk about salaries.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I think you read too much into that. He's just being the humble and cool guy he is. It's not as taboo here like it is in the US.[1]
May figures may be a few years out of date, but it's not that far off. Also varies with where you live. Stockholm pays a bit more, but is also significantly more expensive to live in.
This is also assuming you're employed. Contractors will probably at least double that.
I don't live in the US but get the impression that US prices have skyrocketed in many cities? Like paying $20 for a sandwich in California for example, or $4k rents in New York. So even though the dollar is a stronger currency internationally, it's worth less and less within the country?
If that's true, retiring in Europe might get more and more common for US software developers...
Even in East Bay Area, you'll pay $10 for a sandwich and $2k for renting a 1 br apartment. It's not that much more than Western Europe for an equivalent thing.
I don't know how taxes work in Sweden, but in most countries gifts and donations are taxed at much lower rate than employment income, so I would expect the net income to be way higher than $2k.
I don't think many people would choose to be paid an indeterminate amount by their employer each month, consisting of how much they feel like paying that month.
That's literally fraud and tax evasion which comes with enormous fines, prison time, revocations of licenses and so on, which is why people don't do that.
Since he's employed he also needs to pay payroll tax. Roughly speaking with both income tax and payroll tax accounted for, you usually end up with at about 50%.
Average weekly working hours: 30.9 hours per week in 2011, it had dropped to 30.1 in 2021, only being below 30 in 2020
Across Sweden, only around 1% of employees work more than 50 hours a week, one of the lowest rates in the OECD, where 13% is the average. By law, Swedes are given 25 vacation days, while many large firms typically offer even more. Parents get 480 days of paid parental leave to split between them
Joe Armstrong, Erlang creator, talked a lot about being able to work on Erlang while being in Sweden because as a parent he was allowed to work less hours a day and had plenty of free time.
I averages may be a bit quite deceiving since they're across industries. About 80% of office workers do a full 40 hour week.
More than 40 is likewise very rare. A work-week is legally standardized up to at most 40 hours. Overtime is a thing, but demanding chronic overtime without good reason is a legal liability, where the boss responsible is held personally liable.
Averages are not the same across different statistical distributions.
In the case of working hours, the Swedish median, mode and mean are heavily divergent, since the distribution is truncated at 40 hours by the law and thus heavily skewed.
No one in Scandinavia pays anything like that amount of income tax.
Sweden has three levels (2106)
0 %, up to 18 800 kr
About 31 % for 18 800 to 443 200 kr.
31 % + 20 % (statlig skatt): 443 200 kr to 638 800 kr.
31 % + 25 % (statlig skatt): 638 800 kr and above
5200 USD is about 550 000 SEK so 31% of about 250 000 SEK plus 51% of about 100 000 SEK.
This is so fantastic to read -- congrats Andreas! I admit I am very envious reading this. I would love to be in a similar situation, able to focus full time on a passion project (in my case, video game development). Maybe it's time to start planning my own Patreon...
I've been absolutely loving his videos on SerenityOS and especially the browser Ladybird, the problems and challenges that are faced are so much fun to work through.
It's really great to see someone with such a passion being able to make a living from it.
How much time or focus is associated with "money making" activities would be my question? And is it less than it would take to earn than money part time and focus the rest on serenity OS?
I'd also add that this model - contribution supported - may work for people who have already built something great, but it dangerous to aspire too because some people just end up being beggars and optimizing for trying to get handouts ("buy me a coffee") instead of putting their project first* (to be clear, I don't think that's the case here)
*edit: not a unique problem to this model, same thing happens with "founders" trying to optimize for VC money instead of making something
At least of some of that "making money" stuff is just the sort of publicity you should be doing to help your project even if making money isn't the goal.
I honestly think it's more common for projects to under-do that than to over-do it.
Interesting. I've never taken a keen interest in the project because I think the WIndows 95 look reminds me too much of Microsoft and fvwm95 :)
I'd love to see a remake of HP-UX's VUE (there is in fact a remake of the later CDE, and CDE itself is open-sourced). And it has almost the same UI but it's much more boring than VUE. VUE was from HP had smooth non-serif fonts and wild colour schemes. CDE was a followup joint-venture from HP, Sun and IBM and as a result they made it much more businessy. Serif fonts and boring brownish colours.
But all these things are super niche obviously, and it's really good to hear that he can still make a living from it.
Living on donations, especially recurring donations like Patreon, must be difficult. It is the first thing people cancel when the economy gets difficult like high energy prices, and you also can't ask for a raise.
Well, you can of course increase the pricing of the Patreon tiers but then you run the risk that (1) forgotten recurring donations get a reminder and will be shut down, (2) people won't accept the new pricing and cancel their donation.
Definitely happy patronage is keeping the developer and the projects afloat, but boy am I worried about Microsoft controlling the GitHub Sponsor space and what that could mean for the future.
Andreas is a truly inspiring individual. I follow his videos on YouTube for a long time and his calmness and direction while coding the SerenityOS is something I try to learn from him.
>I’ve also been approached by a handful of folks from VC firms and while I have nothing against them, I’m not taking any meetings. I’m not interested in selling influence over the things I work on, and I’d much rather have many small donors who believe in me than one huge investor telling me what to do.
I wonder why. I love SerenityOS but it doesn't seem the kind of thing a venture capitalist would be interested in
"As you can see, the numbers above put me at roughly $4200 this month. My wife and I live a modest life, and while taxes in Sweden are high, this is enough to break even where we are right now."
Break-even?! No, no, no. He's doing so much amazing work he should be making a lot more.
In any case, congrats on living the dream and working on things you can be proud of. I hope it never ends (or it ends on your terms).
This is a great statement! I think it’s a privilege to work on something you’d put your own money into, and have conviction about. I’m happy that you have found that thing.
He was an engineer at Apple for many years I think. So that means he has some buffer to take on Serenity for last 2 years. I wish him good success and hope to see him having to not worry about money. Subscribe and support him!
> He's doing so much amazing work he should be making a lot more.
What do you mean by this? His situation seems perfectly good - he has enough to live on without drawing down savings and gets to work on his passion project.
If we think he should get more in donations, we should donate more, I guess?
At a job you tend not to worry about next months salary being s lot less. If you are let go because they can’t afford you you get a job somewhere else. So being poor (as in can’t make ends meet) is less of a concern than something like this. If I were doing this then “marketing” would also be on my mind.
> If you are let go because they can’t afford you you get a job somewhere else
I think this part of the situation is the same for the author. They may not want to, but if their donations fall below an acceptable level, they too can get a job somewhere.
Absolutely agree. The older I get the more I realize we all have a few callings in life, and not all of them are justly compensated for the purposes they fill, but it does not make them any less significant in my eyes.
> Once the channel grew large enough, I was able to enable monetization in the form of ads. I felt a bit weird about this, since I use an ad blocker myself, but I figured that the kind of person who watches my content is perfectly aware of ad blockers and can make their own decisions about them.
I just newer see myself investing years in something just for fun. Supposing I'm rich and I don't need to work for money (which is not the case) I still want to work on something that people will find value using. The more people finding that something useful, the better.
Even when I wrote code just for learning or wrote a PoC, I tried to make it something usable by someone else.
It's not that what I do is great, is that I derive more joy from building something useful than from the mere process of building something.
To me code that sits unused is dead code and a loss of the most important human resource: time.
So I can see a value in writing something like Minix or a RTOS for microcontrollers or even research OSes, but I can't see value in writing another OS, browser engine and building a programming language to rewrite the OS in without a clear purpose.
There might be an entertaining value in it, a learning experience, fun but I guess you can derive all of that by working on something that has a purpose.
It's not a critique of the author, who I am sure it's a nice guy, and I wrote this hoping to be contradicted, hoping that someone can give me reasons why endeavors like this might be valuable.
I find this take to be totally
opposite to my way of thinking.
Surely doing things for fun is the most important part of life? That is, if you don’t enjoy doing something then doing that something is a much bigger waste of time than doing something you genuinely enjoy.
Are you suggesting the OP would be better off doing something boring or annoying or something he dislikes? Would you suggest to your children that they should do a job or work in a field they don’t enjoy?
The world is moved forward by people following their passions and interests, and I would argue that the OP is likely to advance his life AND career much faster by pursuing his passions than doing something he dislikes.
Doing things for other people is a big part of why I do programming as well, so while everyone should make up their own mind about what motivates them, I feel the same way as you.
I worked as a software developer and CTO for a bunch of startups, most of which folded. You spend months and maybe years writing software and features, thinking about every last edge case and how to avoid bugs when weird things happen, then no weird things happen because nobody uses the software, so in a way you might as well not have bothered.
At my current place, just working as a senior developer, I released a feature, which was an niche feature and only available to paying subscribers, but it was already discovered and used millions of times within the first few weeks, and there were forum posts where lots of people posted how useful the feature was to them, etc. The feature wasn't that technically complex, but I derived a lot of satisfaction from the fact it was highly-used and appreciated.
That's based on the assumption that Serenity will never get to the point where it is truly useful and able to be used as your primary operating system. And I can understand that assumption, but it's also never going to happen if no one goes and does it, even if the task is daunting and monumental. I think if progress keeps up at the current rate, it will still take many years, but this will absolutely turn into something more than just a novelty.
I wouldn't go as far as to say the software isn't usable by other people. They also seem to get revenue from Youtube videos therefore they are producing something usable by someone else, which is entertainment.
BTW now that I've read more about SerenityOS I really want to run it.
They are "valuable" because people are paying for it. Maybe the value is only in learning how a project like this turns out in the end. But as long as people pay for it that demonstrates there is value in it.
> I created a Patreon back in April of 2019. I felt a bit silly at the time, with thoughts like “who do I think I am” and “what am I even doing” echoing in my head. I still did it though. I was too curious to see what would happen, even though I expected nothing. Amazingly, a couple of people actually signed up!
I'm definitely relating to this experience. Feels hella pretentious and weird to set up donations. Was likewise surprised to actually get people sending me money. I guess the moral of the story is if you build cool things, people are willing to chip in.