potential (very small pot) of funding for ensime

[Sam Halliday]

Hi all,

When it comes to projects like Ensime, any improvements that impact my workflow are of value to me. But I could easily spend all my free time working on Ensime instead of other projects I'm involved in. I would like to conduct an experiment that means I pay to fund the bits of Ensime that I would work on myself if I had an infinite amount of time.

I cannot justify matching commercial Scala hour/day rates, so this is only going to appeal to people looking for some extra income (e.g. put towards a guilt-free computer upgrade, or as an alternative to student / postgrad side jobs). I've never earned a penny (directly) from my OSS projects, and I was just thinking how great it would have been when I was younger to be paid to work on the projects I liked to use. The money I'm talking about is not going to appeal to professional programmers: I'm sorry my budgets can't stretch that far.

I've been building up a bunch of ideas that I'd like to fund here: https://github.com/fommil/unix/issues?labels=may+fund

and in particular for Ensime, that means everything gathered in the meta-ticket https://github.com/fommil/unix/issues/26 

I have yet to think about the practicalities of directing work and paying for it. Maybe Bounty Source is the way to do it, otherwise I'm happy using PayPal to unlock funds when pre-agreed tickets are closed (and the bounty would expire after too long without any visible movement or communication).

I was thinking something like $50 - $250 for a ticket (averaging $100) and I would probably only do it for one ticket initially, opening up the total fund to $2,000 if it goes well.

If you think this is something that would interest you, and it suits your circumstances, please let me know your thoughts! (You can reply here, or email me privately) Proving your competence in scala/elisp would obviously be necessary, and if there are several people who are interested I'll have to go with the person who seems most likely to deliver.

And if anybody else would like to dip into their pockets for Ensime I'm sure we could co-ordinate a larger fund :-)

Best regards,

Sam

[Sam Halliday]

I've added some bounties to tickets on bountysource.com

Admitedly, I've picked some pretty hard ones to put my money on first of all... but I'm also planning to back a few of the smaller ones too.

I'm planning to do some work on the Lucene backend (I've created a milestone for this work) and when my initial pass is finished, there will likely be a couple of tangible pieces of work that are left.

In the meantime, I've tagged a bunch of the smaller tickets with an appropriate label as any of them should be smallish pieces of work in themselves (and a great way to get into the ENSIME codebase!)

https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server/issues?labels=Low+Hanging+Fruit

[Sam Halliday]

More on this, almost all the tickets on the next "Code Cleanup" milestone now have enough bounties on them to treat whoever implements them to a good bottle of wine or a couple of beers.

Most of them really are low hanging fruit, so if you've thought about helping out with ENSIME... now would be a really great time to start :-)

  https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server/issues?milestone=6

And a really easy one: would anybody like to write a little bit of documentation by creating a fully commented example `.ensime` file?

  https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server/issues/480

There are some recent changes in both the emacs and server codebase that make the current documentation slightly out of date. Both myself and @edani can explain the new bits if all the already-documented parts of the file format are written up by somebody. No doubt aemon can also help with the blanks.

Best regards,

Sam

[Sam Halliday]

Apologies, that should have been milestone 5:

https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server/issues?milestone=5