It's interesting to see some people are making it work living off these types of projects.<p>> 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!<p>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.
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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 awesome and I'm confident SerenityOS and all its related projects (eg Ladybird) will only grow in popularity over time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think what he's done is amazing for these reasons:<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
There was also an amazing new talk on porting Zig to SerenityOS today on youtube: <a href="https://youtu.be/Ug3p8vELJqQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Ug3p8vELJqQ</a>
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.
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).
There is an interview with Andreas Kling about SerenityOS on the CoRecursive podcast here: <a href="https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/" rel="nofollow">https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/</a>
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.
I could not / can not be as brave as Andreas.<p>There would seem to be great uncertainty in how much money
he will make per month.<p>He does have multiple income streams which is great, but none
of them fixed (I think).<p>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.<p>However, they all kept getting extended, which was good but also bad.<p>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.<p>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)<p>I think most people on HN are a lot better at handling
being a freelancer and being independent.
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?
It's surprising you can live off $4200 / month in Sweden (after tax I presume that's about <i>$2000 / month</i>).<p>That is below minimum wage in a place like Seattle for example ($14.49 / hour ~ $2,500 / month gross).
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.<p>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?<p>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)<p>*edit: not a unique problem to this model, same thing happens with "founders" trying to optimize for VC money instead of making something
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 :)<p>I'd love to see a remake of HP-UX's VUE (there <i>is</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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."<p>Break-even?! No, no, no. He's doing so much amazing work he should be making a lot more.<p>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).
Congratulations. I have only listened to your awesome programming sessions once or twice, and did find them very enjoyable!<p>On an unrelated note, regarding your setup: which theme are you using in CLion? Thanks!
So many comments saying he should make more doing something else, how low his wage is, etc.<p>He said he’s HAPPY doing this. For some people that, in itself, can be enough.<p>It feels like so many here are trying to convince others of their world view instead of accepting the one this person shared.<p>As someone in a position to do something similar: Thanks for sharing!
> 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.<p>The classic.
I guess doing things for fun is ok.<p>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.<p>Even when I wrote code just for learning or wrote a PoC, I tried to make it something usable by someone else.<p>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.<p>To me code that sits unused is dead code and a loss of the most important human resource: time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.