Episode 152: Dudley Carr and Wes Carr on StackAid

Guest Dudley Carr | Wes Carr Panelists Richard Littauer | Justin
Dorfman Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where
we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. On this
episode, we have two guests joining us. Today, we’ll be talking
with Dudley Carr and Wes Carr, who are brothers and Founders of
StackAid, which is a monthly subscription you can use to
automatically fund all of your dependencies. We’ll be discussing
all things StackAid, learn more about Wes and Dudley’s backgrounds,
some long-term goals they have, and exciting things on the horizon
for StackAid. Go ahead and download this episode now to learn more!
[00:02:43] Wes tells us what StackAid is and how it’s different.
Also, he explains why they chose to only fund first and second
order. [00:05:44] Since StackAid’s goal is to help developers get
money for their careers, we find out how many users are using the
platform, how many maintainers, and their corporate sponsor.
[00:06:58] In 2006, their start-up got acquired, so we hear about
that start-up. [00:09:17] Dudley worked at Google and then switched
to Moz and started working on Node.js stuff, and he explains when
he made the decision to start tackling dependency payments, helping
maintainers, and how they’re self-funding the work. [00:13:41]
We’ll find about Sentry being the only corporate sponsor currently
for StackAid and why the most important base they can rely on is
individual developers. [00:19:14] Richard wonders what Wes and
Dudley are going to do to convince developers to donate more of
their money besides putting out content and they explain what their
focus is right now. [00:22:23] A question comes up if Wes or Dudley
have looked into the minimum viable income that they think has an
effect on a project’s health. [00:24:49] We hear what Wes and
Dudley are doing to help diversify the developer stack and how they
allocate their funds. [00:28:59] Dudley explains the reasons why
they have zero guides to for people to tell them how they should
spend their money in order to make the project more sustainable.
[00:31:44] Wes shares the hardest part about building StackAid so
far, and some long- term goals and exciting things coming up for
StackAid. [00:38:08] Find out where you can follow along with Wes
and Dudley online. Quotes [00:08:13] “We attended a peer-to-peer
conference back in the day where Shawn Fanning was attending this
kind of stuff, and then we bumped into some Google people.”
[00:09:30] “Wes and I have been close to open source for a very
long time. We’ve consumed it since the late nineties and have
benefited from it tremendously.” [00:10:36] “We wanted to make a
concrete contribution back into the open source community in some
form.” [00:17:16] “I think evangelism is super important.”
[00:17:50] “It’s like saying I’m not going to recycle, but I expect
the company that I work for to recycle.” [00:23:50] “There’s an
amount of space that we need to be able to buy people and give them
that freedom and that cushion so that they can think of new things
or reinvest it in things that they’ve done.” Spotlight [00:38:54]
Justin’s spotlight is asdf. [00:39:40] Richard’s spotlight is
Donald Hall’s and his essay, The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on
the Secret to Lasting Love (The Marginalian). [00:40:16] Dudley’s
spotlight is the NSQ project. [00:40:52] Wes’s spotlight is
Benthos. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS
Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/)
podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard
Littauer Twitter
(https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Justin Dorfman Twitter
(https://twitter.com/jdorfman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
Dudley Carr LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dudleycarr)
Dudley Carr Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/dudley) Wes Carr
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wescarr) Wes Carr Twitter
(https://twitter.com/wescarr_) StackAid Twitter
(https://twitter.com/stackaid) StackAid-Mastodon Social
(https://mastodon.social/@stackaid) StackAid
(https://www.stackaid.us/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 148: Ali Nehzat
of thanks.dev and OSS Funding
(https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/nehzat) Sustain
Podcast-Episode 96: Chad Whitacre and how Sentry is giving $150k to
their OSS Dependencies
(https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/chad-whitacre) Sustain
Podcast-Episode 149: Naytri Sramek on the GitHub Accelerator and
M12 GitHub Fund (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/sramek) asdf
(https://asdf-vm.com/) The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the
Secret to Lasting Love (The Marginalian)
(https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/07/13/donald-hall-the-third-thing/?mc_cid=1447853901&mc_eid=e96a303fd2)
NSQ (https://nsq.io/) Benthos (https://www.benthos.dev/) Credits
Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by
Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/)
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound
(https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: Dudley Carr and
Wes Carr.