Road to Working on SerenityOS & Ladybird Full-Time

When I submitted my first pull request to the SerenityOS repo I had no idea where this journey would take me. Since then, almost three years and 3,200+ commits later, I have:

• Learned C++, and a ton about systems programming in general
• Helped building LibJS, our from-scratch JavaScript engine, from the ground up
• Become the first appointed project maintainer
• Joined TC39 as an Invited Expert to represent LibJS
• Made a bunch of friends in our community :^)

You can read more about my history in the SerenityOS project in a previous blog post.

All of this I have done on the side, as a hobby project. I truly enjoy leading LibJS development, working on LibWeb, and everything else around it so I didn't mind spending a bunch of my spare time on it. The only issue here is that spare time is, well, limited. You might see where this is going… :^)

A New Chapter

It was clear this needed to happen eventually so I could keep up with the expectations I set for myself, but today it becomes official: I have now made it my goal to transition to working on SerenityOS, Ladybird, and open source in general full time!

As a first step I have reduced the hours at my regular job — beginning with one day a week for open source work, every week :^)

I will still do contributions in my spare time of course, but having dedicated full days allows me to tackle bigger projects and have more uninterrupted time.

It's not just doing more work for the sake of it, primarily I want to get Ladybird to a point where you & I can use it as an everyday web browser. This will take a lot of time and effort, but I think it's totally feasible!

Sponsorship

Of course I will need to find other sources of income before I can even think about fully committing, and GitHub sponsors is a big part of that! I joined back in June 2021 so people could support me financially if they wanted to, and while it definitely helped with covering domain costs and purchasing better hardware for making videos, I didn't want to advertise it much without a larger goal in mind.

Now I have such a goal, and the best way to help me achieving it is sponsorship on GitHub or Liberapay! A huge thanks to everyone already supporting me this way, or considering it now — I couldn't do the next part of this journey without you ❤️