Going full time on Crystal

News
1

Going full time on Crystal

Hi everyone,

Some of you know me already. I’m Serdar (sdogruyol), I created Kemal, I’m on the Crystal Core Team, and I’ve been building Crystal tools since 2015.

I’ve decided to go full time on Crystal open source. No safety net, no backup plan. Just building for this community every day.

:telescope: What I’m working on

gcry - a native garbage collector for Crystal. Currently at ~89% of Boehm GC’s throughput with ~0.95x RSS. My goal is to make it the default GC for Crystal one day.

Kemal - 3.8k+ stars, 5M+ downloads. I maintain the whole ecosystem. Framework, session, CSRF, auth, caching, and more. I’ve been doing this since 2015 and I’m not stopping.

Crystal Weekly - keeping the community updated with the best resources every week.

Crystal Community - discover Crystal developers around the world.

Free books - Crystal for Rubyists, Kemal El Kitabı, Crystal El Kitabı. All free, all in Turkish and English.

:gem_stone: Why I’m here

I set up a GitHub Sponsors page. My goal is $1,000/month so I can keep doing this full time. If my work has helped you or your company, please consider sponsoring. Every dollar counts.

Sponsorship tiers:

Tier Price Perk
:hot_beverage: Coffee $5 Sponsor badge
:high_voltage: Kebab $10 Badge + personal thanks
:hammer_and_wrench: Backer $20 Name in Kemal README
:trophy: Champion $50 Logo + shoutout
:office_building: Corporate $100 Logo + Twitter shoutout

Thanks for reading. Let’s keep building Crystal together. :rocket:

:backhand_index_pointing_right: github.com/sponsors/sdogruyol

2

That’s a bold move and I hope you’re endeavour is successful. :heart_hands:

Thank you for exploring this opportunity to drive Crystal Open Source forward.

3

Sounds great, but take care of yourself and don’t burn out. We’ve still got a long way to go!

4

I wish you success! And waiting for the printed books!

I don’t know what are your plans, but I remember finding the Laravel books from Dayle Rees in his website (13 years ago), completely for free for online reading, but mentioning we could purchase them (same content) at leanpub.com

I purchased multiple books from him, each book for a new Laravel release.

This strategy was successful for him, because he easily sold more than 10k copies, with a minimum price of $10 at that time. The complete free online version in his website created a natural funnel for happy paying readers to the paid version.

And you can go even further by not only publishing and selling digital copies, but also printed ones, for a higher price (and higher markup).

By growing your user base, it can bring happy devs that want to learn more, and extract more from Kemal

The point was that the book removed the barrier of entry for me. It solves a paradox. People like to learn by example in a step-by-step guide. And pay for it. Then advocate for your framework in new projects.