Harlan Wilton

February 2023: GitHub Sponsor perks and firing a freelance client

Published Mar 1st 2023
3 minute read

Meet up

I'm back in Sydney for a couple of months while working on open-source.

In the area and want to catch up? Get in touch!

Hello, my amazing sponsors! Welcome to first ever newsletter. I have some exciting things to share with you.

GitHub Sponsors Perk Updates

Going forward, I'll be improving your sponsor perks in three ways.

Early Access Monthly Newsletter

At the start of each month, I'll be sending a newsletter (just like this one).

This will cover my achievements, financials, and plans for the month ahead.

I'll post these publicly towards the end of the month on my blog.

New Discord Role / Channels

I have a Discord server that I use to provide support to many of my open-source packages. If you have any technical issues you'd like help on, feel free to ask here.

I have the following new perks within discord:

  • New role: "sponsor"
  • New discussion channel: 💎・priority-support.

Link to join: https://discord.gg/FC8FgHuC

Bi-monthly Video Call

Every 2 months, I'm going to schedule a time to do a video call with any sponsors who would like to join. In it, you can ask me any questions or just hang out, no pressure smile

  • 30-60 minutes
  • Held in discord (link above)
  • First call is scheduled for 9pm AEDT, calendar invite link

Month Review

Achievements

My personal, open-source and freelancing achievements.

OSS

  • ⭐ 3431 GitHub stars (+231)
  • Unhead v1.1 release, many performance and security improvements
  • Nuxt OG Image Satori Support and OG Image Playground

Personal

  • 🍴 I started the month with a 120-hour fast (5 days)! Went pretty well, and lost 4kg
  • ✈️ Gave notice to move out of our apartment at the end of March

Sponsorship Impressions (sites only)

The analytics of people who see your generous sponsorship on my doc / personal sites.

👨 5.7k visitors (-22) 👀 26.3k views (+4k)

My February 2023 Fathom Traffic
My February 2023 Fathom Traffic

Financials

How sustainable is my current open-source work

My financial goal for February was saving $10k, as I have some travel plans coming up. I planned to spend 50% of my time on open-source.

I had a ~100-hour project booked with one of my clients. Around 40 hours into the project it was clear that I couldn't work with them anymore on it. I decided to fire them and ended up refunding them 40 hours of work to be done with it.

While this was quite a hit, the peace of mind of not having to work with them anymore on it was worth it. I'll avoid any bad-mouthing, I'll just say that they weren't pleasant to work with.

OSS

  • ⌛ 111 hrs
  • 💸 A$617.06
  • A$5.55 / hour

Freelancing

  • ⌛ 78.25 hrs (+ 35.25 hrs)
  • 💸 A$3015 (- $517.5)
  • A$38.53 / hour (-$42.67)

March plans

By the end of this month, I'll be starting my travels for 3 months in Asia, going from Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia.

During this time, I'll continue to work on open-source, just while sitting on a beach drinking a coconut.

Until then I have some goals:

  • Significantly improve the Unhead performance in Nuxt (feat: server/client only composables, feat(head): improved Unhead integration)
  • Docs site for Nuxt SEO Kit
  • Make Nuxt OG Image an official Nuxt module, have a few bugs to fix
  • Land a few more Nuxt PRs

Summary

I hope you've enjoyed the first newsletter! Again, please join me for the first sponsors call on the 7th if you're interested.

Best wishes to all of you and I hope you have an amazing month ahead.

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