In my last post, I discussed the high-level “what” of my current endeavor—to fully actualize the design potential of the VB.NET experience. This post is a little more practical about one necessary aspect of how we get there and sustain everything that’s built along the way.

To be blunt, this is a post about (crowd)funding and there is a Patreon call-to-action at the end but ultimately, I want to create a more robust solution that is community-centric rather than company-centric or me-centric and that’s what I’m going to talk about first. I’m going to lay out my long-term vision for how the VB.NET community can collectively sustain itself in an independent way and then in the second part I’m going to talk in a very pragmatic way about how I can maintain my own level of contribution through the short- (read: starting today) to medium-term. Both the long- and short-term views, I believe, are critical to ultimate success so I encourage you to read through both and understand if, what, when, and how you see yourself contributing.

Long-Term Vision

I remember a few years back catching a Tweet from Xamarin founder and then Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Miguel de Icaza advocating for the unionization of tech workers. I had been questioning (in my own head) for a while the assumption that as software developers we already have it “so good” that we don’t need unions and that beyond wages and benefits packages there’s not really value to be added for the tech worker. I don’t believe this assumption and I was so glad someone else in the industry and someone so successful therein had said it out loud.

Continuing this as a thought exercise I considered that employees aren’t the only other participants in the business of technology who could benefit from the ability to collectively organize, bargain, and act. The customers are often also at a huge disadvantage in the relationship with big tech. If you build on any technology produced and controlled by a singular corporation, you’re at the mercy of that corporation and whatever its transient agendas are. And if one day that agenda requires or benefits from, bluntly, abandoning that technology, as an individual developer or even a small-medium sized company with a large investment in software built on that technology your options are often few. This power imbalance becomes more drastic when doing business with multi-trillion dollar massively diversified companies like the ones that lead the tech industry in the US and abroad.

My thinking in the moment was, wouldn’t it be an interesting dynamic if, for example, a large portion of Microsoft Azure subscribers could “go on strike” to prevent the sudden and rather graceless abandonment of, e.g., Silverlight, etc.

That idea is ridiculous. Or at least, improbable, I think, but the point of the thought exercise remains that a more equitable structure between the producers and consumers of technologies would benefit consumers. And philosophically, this isn’t about VB.NET alone—we all could rattle off a long list of successful productive technologies that have gone out of favor with their original creators. If the business is looking out for the shareholders, and a labor union is looking out for the employees, who’s looking out for the customer?

Fast forward some thinking and research, and you come to the idea of a consumer cooperative. An organization collectively owned and managed by its members—the consumers—which optimizes not for profit but for consumer value. I would like to see a collective, technology adopter-owned model gain traction in the industry. The membership would be made up of individual developers and companies that adopt one or more related technologies. Some members would contribute to the development of those technologies and the membership would democratically make decisions on how to manage the lifecycle of those technologies, presumably without disproportionate regard to fads or any one member.

And again, I’m not saying this just as a VB.NET enthusiast but honestly as someone who’s followed the full Microsoft technology stack for like 20 years now. I’m just fatigued with the cycle. I’m tired of feeling anxiety about Thing K because other Thing M came out. I’m not saying new technologies shouldn’t come out, or that as consumers we should never migrate to a new platform or library but that I personally want that process to be entirely driven by a community of pragmatic individual choices about the real benefits and tradeoffs of new technologies over established ones rather than any sense of fear about the motivations or limitations or ambitions or caprice of any single company or the coupling of that company’s business interests in one space to another.

Using Silverlight again as an example, I am more than happy to adopt modern web-assembly based technology to provide rich desktop-like experiences on the web over Silverlight, in my own time and for my own reasons. I just don’t want Apple announcing that iPhone won’t support Flash and how that relates to Microsoft’s phone business (or any phone business) to be one of those reasons. (Shout out to OpenSilver for their modern, plugin-free, open source re-implementation of Silverlight!) I don’t want to go without a reasonable incremental update to the technology I’m using to not happen because a newer technology exists and “they” are pushing folks to use it instead so what I’m using today is frozen to provide some perverse incentive to migrate. I don’t want fear and frustration to be my forcing functions. I want an inversion of control.

Now, I’m not saying Microsoft or any other company should be forced to invest heavily in any particular technology indefinitely or even one more day than is in their business interest. What I don’t want is the outlook and lifecycle of, as much as practical, my tools to be dangerously and at times violently coupled to those interests. It’s just stress I don’t need for the next 30 years of my career. I want a setup where they don’t have to and the world can keep spinning productively.

So, with all that said, I believe that what the VB.NET community needs is an independent, community-owned (adopter-owned) non-profit organization unequivocally devoted to advancing the VB.NET experience and to growing and supporting the ecosystem of related tools and technologies to maximize community-value.

In this last year many VB enthusiasts have come to me privately and said, “if only we could pool our resources … all the developers and companies with important codebases in VB and fund more work on VB…”. Well, we can do exactly that, not unlike the Python community with their foundation, and the F# community, and the Haskell community, and the Rust community, and so many others. There are going to be tools and websites and samples and templates and extensions and packages and videos and more and ultimately, I would like the assets I build around ModVB or anyone else builds to further the VB.NET experience to be owned and maintained by such a VB.NET “foundation”. But that’s not an overnight process and I’m only very early in researching the practicalities of such an organization and how it would relate to Microsoft and the .NET Foundation and regardless building the membership required to fund VB.NET’s bright future will take considerable time. Which brings me to…

Short-Term Realities

Okay, so that’s the long term and the broad view for the community. How do I personally keep a roof over my head and food on my table while building up all these goodies for myself and fellow VB enthusiasts? Several potential approaches present themselves:

• Get another part-time or full-time job, or recurring “gig”
• Independent consulting/contracting
• Support contracts
• Crowdfunding

Until this summer I worked a full-time consulting job in Chicago and while lucrative it left virtually no time or energy (mental and otherwise) to pursue the various designs I had in mind for ModVB. In fact, having worked completely full-time for two straight months on the JSON literals and pattern matching features in Wave 1 of ModVB, I cannot imagine in hindsight what I was thinking before. The idea that I could put in that kind of effort on the side or on the weekends is laughable and to achieve just what I achieved in Wave 1 could easily have taken me a year putting in a few hours on Saturdays and that’s assuming my every consulting project was zero-stress, on time, on budget, just one project at a time, going smoothly every week with late nights or weekends. In my experience this just isn’t realistic.

As for part-time work… it’s a strange thing in our industry that you can make a very good living working 50+ hours a week but if you just want to work 20-25 hours it doesn’t just cut your earning potential in half. Time is the most valuable resource we have in life and it’s very difficult to negotiate for more of it while also not struggling and that’s been the challenge for me with part-time work. This paradox is exacerbated with the “gig economy”. I’ve tried to work Uber part-time to allow me the freedom to pursue my vision but the earnings compared to working in my field just aren’t there. Why stress out 30+ hours a week to barely make ends meet when I could stress out full-time and earn many multiples more.

So that’s the options that offer security. That leaves me with a blended strategy of the other three. Independent contracting gives me more flexibility on time insofar as I can decide after a project when to take on more work (if available). I’m currently looking at some VB freelancing opportunities and welcome any offers or connections from any of my readers or supporters for more.

Support contracts are the way I’ve heard of other freeware projects getting funded, like various Linux distributions. I make ModVB great and then companies that want to use ModVB can pay me a support contract to help them use it or prioritize their bugs or train them. While I’m committed to producing a quality product and fixing bugs regardless it’s certainly possible to prioritize some things to contract supporters. I don’t have much experience with this kind of dual-licensing strategy but I do believe you need a critical mass of functionality before you can offer support contracts and ModVB isn’t there yet. As the project matures this option will hopefully become more realistic.

Finally, I’m left with crowdfunding. Doing great work and hoping that the community of VB.NET enthusiasts and other interested parties will support me doing more of it. As scary as a leap of faith can be I feel this is the right time to take one. And so, today, I’m officially launching my very own Patreon. I don’t have much to offer by way of swag or private discord servers, but I am open to suggestions for more ways to connect with my supporters. I expect this will be a long journey. I’m not expecting everyone to dig deep in their wallets overnight but with each successive wave of features and tools I’m optimistic more and more of the community will come on board and lift me and the project. If you look at my page you’ll see I’m not trying to be greedy or make a fortune; it’s very pragmatically structured around my making ends meet to empower me to deliver the most value for the VB community. Every day I’m chasing alternate opportunities to earn money is a day I’m not spending advancing VB.NET to be all it can be, so, please check it out, support if you can, and share it with your colleagues and fellow community members. Thanks!

Next post

My next post will be an update on the state of Wave 2, which is currently targeted for one or more potentially incremental releases starting around the middle of this month (December). It should be fun times so look forward to it.

Regards,

-ADG