Alex Laird

My earliest serious interest was coding. Before I knew it could be a profession—before I knew I even needed to think about a future means of making money—I just loved the feeling of building, of writing complex input that produced simple output. It's why, no matter what I'm doing professionally, I continue to code on the side too. And it's why I ❤️ open source. It's a community of likeminded individuals who feel that same drive to create, sometimes for the result, but just as often simply for the feeling of creating.

I ❤️ developing software for free. But software isn't free to develop. Projects like Helium Student Planner have monthly infrastructure costs just to keep the lights on for the thousands of students that use it every day. Libraries like pyngrok, which has hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads, require time and money to build and evolve. Those are just two examples, but all of the projects I work on are a labor of love, and if they go unsupported, the simple fact is that I operate at a loss financially for it.

If you use my work as a user, find it helpful as an educational resource, depend on it in your own projects, or are a company that benefits from what I build, it would mean the world to me if you would sponsor me. Thank you for your support 🙏🏻.