Buy a blog post

Posted on 2025-05-29

Get paid to do a thing?

I just read this interesting comment about getting paid for open source. I had a short conversation with the author.

That lead to this lovely bit of text:

When purchasing a license subscription, you are optionally encouraged
to enter your GitHub username; this makes it easier for me to identify
issues created by users with license subscriptions on the Komorebi
GitHub repo.

I like the incentive there, pay to get priority.

So here’s an experiment. I’ll write a list of topics I’ve been meaning to turn into blog posts, and a price, and you, oh well-funded reader, can bribe me to finish them.

What happens when the money arrives? I’ll immediately dump a raw unedited blog post with the description and resources I’ve already collected, and then clean up the post.

I reserve the right to change prices after writing any of these blog posts. As time passes I may grow more or less interested in a topic.

What topics?

A survey of cool tools built on top of tree sitter’s concrete syntax trees. ( $15 )
if your tests are hard to write, your API needs improvements, or test driven development is a great way to sanity check your APIs. ( $15 )
the state of affordable input devices for pose tracking (aka, what happened to the Microsoft Kinect?) ( $50 )
- how pose tracking turns sensor input into human body / hand positions ( $ 500 )
  - pose tracking software for analyzing and teaching martial arts ( $50000 )
puzzles for learning
- Lockhart’s Lament, or why you should keep a mental collection of small fun puzzles. ( $10 )
- Some of the fun mental puzzles I’ve discovered after reading Lockhart’s Lament ( $30 )
- The beauty of Brayden Cassella’s non-terminating beggar-my-neighbor, how someone solved one of my collection of fun puzzles, and why it’s now even more fun. ( $15 )
Why I believe all programmers should read the Hamming book, Art & Fear, SICP, and The Pragmatic Programmer. ( $25 )
How I did my taxes in emacs’ org-mode spreadsheets ( $20 )
- what the accountant thought about me doing my taxes in emacs ( TBD )
A cost comparison of StarLink vs fiber links, where the cost is price per bit over the lifetime of both. ( $50 )
A summary of some papers on the effect of carbon dioxide levels on human cognition ( $35 )
- Is it possible our society has become stupider due to rising global levels of carbon dioxide? ( $30 )
conversations with correctness, why I believe incremental interactive ‘proof assistant’ tools such as GHCi, idris, and wingman are superior to large language models for exploratory programming ( $40 )
An analysis of time to converge on maximum coverage for various property based testing frameworks in Haskell. ( $40 ) This is an extension of my ICFP lightning talk and earlier blog post.
A description of “library sommeliers” that I pitched to the Haskell Foundation ( $25 )
- A prototype “library sommelier” template with working demos ( $75 )
  - A language agnostic website for library sommeliers ( $75000 )
notes on a working spoken programming language that uses Hindley-Milner type inference to decide what part of speech is being spoken now. ( $15 )
Can you discover an unknown element by predicting and analyzing emission spectra from distant stars? Notes from a discussion on the Recurse Center zulip. ( $30 )

This is about a third of the full list, and includes posts I would immediately feel comfortable writing.

What if I want to bribe you to write about a topic that’s not on the list?

I will happily discuss suggestions, send me a message!

What if I want to pair with you on one of these?

That’ll get priority over anything else, I am most productive when working with someone else on a task.

What If I want credit for bribing you?

Sure? I’m also fine if you want to be anonymous.

How do you calculate the price of each blog post?

Mostly by how much I want to write each thing. Small price means I want to do it, and think it’s easy enough. Ok, maybe I just made up all the prices anyway.

Is this for real?

🤔 This could also be an excuse to re-organize my scattered lists of ideas, and find people who want to collaborate.

Conclusion

Post your own “blog post stub” list on your own blog, and SEND ME A LINK!