Episode 152: Dudley Carr and Wes Carr on StackAid

Feb 3, 2023

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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.

Credits

Produced by Richard Littauer
Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound
Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound

Special Guests: Dudley Carr and Wes Carr.

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