tl;dr: if you appreciate my past or ongoing contributions to the Haskell community, please consider helping me get to ICFP by donating via my new ko-fi page!
Working at a small liberal arts institution has some tremendous benefits (close interaction with motivated students, freedom to pursue the projects I want rather than jump through a bunch of hoops to get tenure, fantastic colleagues), and I love my job. But there are also downsides; the biggest ones for me are the difficulty of securing enough travel funding, and, relatedly, the difficulty of cultivating and maintaining collaborations.
I would really like to be able to attend ICFP in Seattle this September; the last time I was able to attend ICFP in person was 2019 in Berlin. With transportation, lodging, food, and registration fees, it will probably come to about $3000. I can get a grant from my instutition to pay for up to $1200, but that still leaves a big gap.
As I was brainstorming other sources of funding, it dawned on me that there are probably many people who have been positively impacted by my contributions to the Haskell community (e.g. CIS 194, the Typeclassopedia, diagrams, split, MonadRandom, burrito metaphors…) and/or would like to support my ongoing work (competitive programming in Haskell, swarm, disco, ongoing package maintenance…) and would be happy to donate a bit.
So, to that end, I have set up a ko-fi page.
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If you have been positively impacted by my contributions and would like to help me get to ICFP this fall, one-time donations — even very small amounts — are greatly appreciated! I’m not going to promise any particular rewards, but if you’re at ICFP I will definitely find you to say thanks!
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Thinking beyond this fall, ideally this could even become a reliable source of funding to help me travel to ICFP or other collaboration opportunities every year. To that end, if you’re willing to sign up for a recurring monthly donation, that would be amazing — think of it as supporting my ongoing work: blog posts (and book) on competitive programming in Haskell, Swarm and Disco development, and ongoing package maintenance. I will post updates on ko-fi with things I’m thinking about and working on; I am also going to try to publish more frequent blog posts, at least in the near term.
Thank you, friends — I hope to see many people in Seattle! Next up: back to your regularly scheduled competitive programming!
blog :: Brent -> [String] 