At &yet, we give Thanksgiving bonuses. The tradition has become something outward-focused.
Software developers hold an exceptionally privileged place in society. We feel not guilty, but grateful for this—yet we fervently believe to whom much has been given, much is required.
Last year, the thrust of our Thanksgiving bonus was providing each of our team one day of paid time off per month to donate to making the world a better place, with us matching any gifts toward that organization.
This year, we have several Thanksgiving announcements:
- We are continuing our program from last year of paid time off for volunteering and financial matching of accompanying donations.
- We are launching a new site to make our space and resources available to our community.
- We are making significant, ongoing financial support for open source projects via Adamantium Sponsorship of scalenpm.org and allowing our developers to allocate GitTip.
Let's talk about the new stuff:
community.andyet.com
We are today launching the first rev of a project which we hope to use to help us better share the beautiful office space and resources we feel so privileged to have with our local community.
We built many of the elements of the office we love with the aim being to share them and make them available to our community, but we haven't had a formal way to do that. This site is our first simple attempt to make that more possible.
Significant, ongoing financial support for open source projects and developers
We know that there are many thankless jobs in open source which ultimately are the hidden costs that enable all of us who work with these technologies able to do the work we love and to ultimately pay our salaries.
Building things sustainably is something we value and want to encourage everywhere we can.
We want to see more support for open source projects by the businesses that depend on them, but rather than write blog posts and tweets about what people ought to do, we're going to help lead the only way we know how—by doing something.
Specifically...
1. Adamantium sponsorship of Scalenpm.org
We have decided to have &yet and ^Lift become "Adamantium" sponsors of scalenpm.org (and not just because Adam Brault and Adam Baldwin are the respective leads of those teams!)
At this point, npm is a service we rely on as much, or more, as GitHub. And it costs real money to run on real servers.
2. GitTip budgets for &yet developers
Each developer on our team is getting $50 per week to target towards open source projects they support. We're pooling our donations as a team so that other companies are also encouraged to step up.
Based on current numbers, doing this will make our team the largest weekly donor on GitTip. This is both awesome and sad. Seriously, we're not that big—it shouldn't even be financially possible for us to be the largest!
(Big hat tip to our friends at Lincoln Loop for already doing this, too. Though they don't pool their donations, so this awesome thing they're doing isn't visible to companies.)
We hope GitTip becomes an arms race of who can best support open source developers for their contributions. We love the mission and the philosophy behind it and we hope that GitTip experiences npm-level explosive growth in this next year.
3. Team sponsorship of Substack / Browserify
We rely on Substack's work in every app we build—most notably Browserify.
We have decided to target $1000 a month as a team specifically in sponsorship of his work.
Happy Thanksgiving!
We hope you and your loved ones have a Happy Thanksgiving from the &yet team.
Thank you so much to all our fellow teammates, clients, customers, sponsors, supporters, encouragers, friends and family.
Everything we love about what we get to do would be impossible without you.