Giving back

Today, I've been at an event run by a local animal rescue charity. It's one that we attend often as my children like to enter the dog show, but this year, I've also sponsored one of the categories.

As well as organising the PHP South Wales user group, I'm also now a sponsor - donating books and elePHPant plushies for raffle prizes and paying the group's Meetup.com subscription costs.

Giving back and supporting open-source maintainers and content creators is a big priority of mine. If I use some open-source software or find that someone's Twitch or YouTube channel is useful, if that person or organisation is on GitHub or Patron, then I'll sponsor them, or I'll subscribe to their channel.

If I find a useful blog post or video, I'll add a comment or link to it on Twitter, thanking them and letting them know that it helped me.

Especially if it's something that I've used within my projects, it makes sense to support it and it's maintainers, so that they keep working on and improving the software, continue streaming, and keep writing blog posts and recording videos for me to learn from.