Hey, I'm Patrick Stapleton, also known as PatrickJS (where the JS is actually my initials haha). I've always been involved with find ways to contribute to Github since the start of my programming. With Github Sponsors, I hope to start a new chapter of sharing my journey. Here's a timeline of my OSS career

A lot of my early OSS work convinced developers to start OSS and by walking them through their first contrib (which was a copyright year change haha). One year, I made 500ish contributions, just changing the copyright year to the correct one. That Github hack was how I contributed to all of the popular OSS repos and learned a lot dealing with everyone's review processes. My early days were focused on getting contributions and removing the barrier to entry. (This was also not the last Github hack I've done)

Next, I focused on learning application structure and code organization for frontend. I would do so by building starter repos with my newly formed opinions (which would change weekly as I was refactoring production apps). I think it's essential for all software engineers to have programming superpowers to start any new project quickly. In the past, I built a lot of Ruby on Rails apps and understood the value of using conventions to make us feel productive. I also authored a lot of 3rd party service integrations with angular.js and spent a lot of time building out glue code.

After I felt pretty confident in OSS, I wanted to create something (that wasn't a starter repo), and this leads me to develop Angular Universal. My journey into bleeding-edge starts which means there are no Docs, and you're the one bleeding having to reverse engineer code to understand how to get everything to work. I worked with Sean Larkin in the early days of Webpack 2 and getting everyone to use it. I worked with Jafar Husain (at the time Netflix) publishing FalcorJS, which was their OSS solution similar to GraphQL. I did a lot of work growing the Angular 2 community with Rob Wormald and the Angular Team. The bleeding edge of OSS was great but quickly led to OSS Burnout as I was highly invested in OSS but had to discover ways to fund it immediately.

At first, teaching code and education seemed to be the natural way to fund OSS. Eventually, this leads to consulting and even creating a startup (which got into ycombinator W18). All of these ventures allowed me to get into what I was calling Open Source Marketing, a lot of Github hacks (not just copyright year changes).

At this stage, there's a lot of new bleeding-edge JavaScript projects that I plan on helping the direction. I want to share with you first and to get your options on its path before release.

By sponsoring me, you're supporting my future contributions and OSS journey.