Introducing webdevladder

Webdevladder is a YouTube channel and blog about the technical topics that interest me as I make open source software. I've been a professional web developer since 2011, and since 2019 I've been working in public full-time, publishing most of my code to GitHub as I write it.

The open web is humanity's shared, decentralized platform. I love the web for its wide reach and gatekeeper optionality. For all its flaws, the web allows us to reach more people with less friction than any other platform. My goal is to work in this space on the things I find meaningful. I've been lucky to have the resources to work independently for the past 5 years as I pursue a career in open source. Over the next few years I hope to continue making software that people value enough to sustain its development.

With webdevladder, I'm producing videos and blog posts about the technology I use in my work, with an emphasis on Svelte and TypeScript. My projects span the whole stack, from a CSS framework to a Svelte UI library to a fullstack social app framework. I also make websites that use the stack and tools to streamline the process. The social app framework is my only project that's not yet released, and I think it's the one that's most likely to gather a community that wants to fund it.

My goal with webdevladder is to deepen my knowledge of web technology and improve my communication skills through blogging and videos. I'm producing educational videos on my main channel, and I have a second channel with less polished content like raw programming sessions and demos of my apps.

But before you subscribe to the feed, here's some more context.

What webdevladder is not

I'm seeking to be an independent open source developer funded directly by my users, which is an uncommon situation in 2024. I hope that the few user-funded developers of today will be joined by many more in the future, and I want to be among them.

I share some similarities with a few contemporary archetypes, but there are important differences. The main point is that I'm devoting my time primarily to making software. All of the other stuff, like this blog, is supplementary.

For one, I'm not a startup. I will never take investor funding for these projects. My goal is to make the best software I can, and extracting profits is counterproductive. I believe you can make good software with a company, even great software, but not the best of the kind I'm building. Incentives always influence action to some degree, and I prefer to keep organizational profitability out of the equation for pure software projects that operate no services.

I'm also not an entertainer, influencer, or video content creator. Making software, not videos, will remain my priority. Being funded through YouTube ad revenue or sponsorships would create different incentives compared to user funding, taking my focus away from building software. My current stance is that I won't do any software-related sponsorships, which means the opinions you get from me are entirely rooted in either my preferences or professional experience.

And finally, I'm not a comprehensive educator. I won't retread the same beginner content that's excellently covered elsewhere, and I won't sell courses or create content for media companies. While webdevladder is educational content, it's tailored to what I find interesting and generally more advanced and less accessible. There's mentorship happening in my Discord, but it can't take me away from the software too much or I'll have to scale it back. I would like to create a community of people who help each other learn, but there are educators who make that their whole thing and do it much better, and my community focuses more on my projects.

My plan

I'm lucky to have the resources to pursue my projects for a few more years, but I need funding in order to continue beyond that. I hope to be funded directly by the people who value my software, videos, and blog posts, so my incentives are as aligned as possible with both you and the software itself.

Zzz is the social app framework that I hope will provide enough value to be funded through donations. It builds on SvelteKit to streamline the creation of many kinds of social websites that are smaller-scale (think Postgres, not sqlite or webscale). Out of the box it'll have chats, true forums, and other discussion formats and information management views using a shared data protocol. The idea is to take care of the bulk of the infrastructure needed to experiment with novel ideas in social contexts.

My other software projects either support Zzz - for example, my CSS framework Moss and Svelte UI library Fuz - or they use Zzz (stay tuned for announcements), or they're for my own amusement and curiosity. They all share a common software base that I've largely built myself, which enables rapid and customizable development.

While Zzz is my only active project that's not yet publicly available, I hope to have the first version released in late 2024. But it may be 2025. Definitely by the end of 2025, that's one software estimate I'll stand by. When it's ready, I'll make a new blog post and video with more of the story.

My plan B is looking for a job where I can work on open source at least some of the time, even if it's not on my own projects. For longer than my 13 year career as a programmer, I've been prototyping software like Zzz as a hobby, and I've taken multiple self-funded breaks to pursue ideas with creative autonomy. This flexibility has led to some unexpected connections that a business would not value like I do, and I can't wait to share the fruits of these explorations.

@webdevladder is a channel where I get to learn the ropes of video communication in a low pressure environment, and Spiderspace will be the channel I launch to share Zzz with a nontechnical audience when it's ready. My other channel @webdevladder_vods gives me even lower pressure experience making videos related to my software and practices, including unfiltered programming sessions for those interested in learning that particular way.

For more about me, see my personal website.

If any of this sounds interesting, there's all kinds of links and buttons to click. See you next time.

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