GitHub Sponsors: Jon Schlinkert JavaScript developer

The 3rd developer on my dependency list is

and he maintain 13 of the dependencies of my projects.

The goals

On one hand he writes about himself that he is a "full-time open source software developer" on the other hand he writes
"If I could afford it, I would spend 100% of my time on open source. That's not a reality yet, but with your help we can make it happen!".

It is unclear how far is he from that goal, but the one he set on GitHub sponsors says:

32% towards 100 monthly sponsors goal

GitHub reports that he has 36 sponsors.

His goal also says "My goal is to reach 100 sponsors by the end of 2023!" and I am writing at the end of April 2024. So clearly he did not manage to reach his goal and forgot to update his goal.

I had the same issue a while ago on my profile. My conclusion is that it is probably better not to include any dates in the goals.

Packages he maintains

He also has tons of JavaScript projects that many people use

I now maintain more than 1,000 open source projects on GitHub, which are cumulatively downloaded over 8.5 billion times every month. This represents about 7% of the total downloads in Node.js

Frankly I don't know how can people come up with so many useful packages. One explanation is that especially in the JavaScript world that people might split up their libraries into several sub-libraries. That might make their use more flexible. It could easily lead to a higher number of packages and to a much higher download number. Or they are just so creative. I don't know.

Tiers

He has tiers between $5 and $1,500. It is unclear how much his supporters pay as he offers the inclusion of the sponsors on his GitHub profile but no sponsor appears on his profile and no company logo is shown either.

Broken links

There are a number of broken links on his GitHub and GitHub sponsors profiles.

• All the tiers link to the "README file", but those links are all broken.
• He ask the sponsors to sent a DM on Twitter, but I could not do so without upgrading my Twitter account to a paid account.
• At another place he asks people to send him an email, but his address is not on his GitHub profile. So I had no way to contact him to send him this report about the broken links.
• The link to LinkedIn on the GitHub profile is incorrect. For this one I could send a PR

Find your contribution at companies

He also links to companies that list the Open Source software they use. He encourages us to look for his name. I think this list can be really useful so I copied it here:

• Discord
• Hitachi
• Amazon for iOS and Android
• Siemens
• Apiary
• Oracle
• Apple
• Verizon
• GE
• Deloitte
• IBM
• Cisco

Conclusion

My gut feeling is that lately Jon does not invest much in his GitHub Sponsors profile and that might be part of the reason he is still far from his goal.

He also does not seem to have a "real estate" that is visited by a lot of people and some of the sponsors I saw earlier seem to be wanted their logo on a frequently visited page.

Follow me / Sponsor me

If you'd like to read more such posts, don't forget to upvote this one, to follow me here on DEV.to and to sponsor me via GitHub Sponsors.