Open source chip-in
Every October for the past 4 years I've been promising myself to chip in some code during the Hacktoberfest. Those plans have (shamefully) all failed until now. I mean doing a little more than a singular PR in a random project or spawning a new "sample repository" just to have the bot count my actions as the free t-shirt credits.
I've already started chipping in to the freeCodeCamp a while back - both financially and in terms of some translations here and there (they have a great setup for it, it's super easy to contribute in this form! Just go to their translation portal or contribution guide to learn more details.)
My life has turned upside down thanks to freely accessible online education & the world of open source software. I strongly believe in giving back, so since I am still debating on what the best way to do it is, for now let me just start a series on how and whom do I back!
This will (hopefully) be a growing list, I am also actively looking for other tools that will help me decide where to chip my cents in! I encourage everyone to follow through on those long forgotten promises and either contribute in whatever way they can!
No brainer: freeCodeCamp.org: https://github.com/sponsors/freeCodeCamp or https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate/ - I don't believe there is much difference between the two. That said, it's usually better to skip the middleman! (personally I am backing through GitHub Sponsors since it became a thing. FreeCodeCamp is one of the most effective charities on earth:
For every dollar donated we turn around and provide nearly 50 hours of learning to people around the world.
I admit I am biassed here, as without FCC I wouldn't be where I am now. That said there are thousands of similar stories around - hell even in the company I work for there are a couple amazing professionals who have the same "origins story".
Individual contributions - with some explanation as to why:
@leaanthonycymru is the author of wails, a great alternative to electron (which is also open source). I've had my fair share of desktop app development and no experience has been on par with what wails delivers (+ the relatively small binary sizes and coding in Go!) Many thanks kind sir.
Nest on the list is @alexellisuk - his open blogging on k8s and hosting clusters on Raspberry Pi have solved so many of my issues (and a very expensive test-cloud bill), he has more projects on that anyone can reasonably keep up with, but Inlets is great (and let's you relatively easily & cheaply expose your private clusters to all of internets - not that you should necessarily do that)!
Last on my list is the hero of the JS community, one man army, maintainer of thousands of packages we all use daily and apparently a dog person.
Next time I turn to the Open Collective and/or BackYourStack (although from what I see it's enough to go to GitHub sponsors page the limitations in terms of ecosystem choice are similar to BYS)