---
title: "February 2023: GitHub Sponsor perks and firing a freelance client · Harlan Wilton"
canonical_url: "https://harlanzw.com/blog/2023-february"
last_updated: "2026-08-14T14:42:24.491Z"
meta:
  description: "I share my updates for February covering my open-source development, financials and personal updates."
  "og:description": "I share my updates for February covering my open-source development, financials and personal updates."
  "og:title": "February 2023: GitHub Sponsor perks and firing a freelance client"
---

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# **February 2023: GitHub Sponsor perks and firing a freelance client**

Published Mar 1st 2023

●

3 minute read

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**](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](https://res.cloudinary.com/dl6o1xpyq/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto:best,dpr_auto/images/feb-fathom.png)

### 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.