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