Very interesting value proposition!
Having watched some interviews with Elm’s creator recently, I wanted to ask where you stand in terms of funding your full-time work on Hologram and if you’re seeking any particular form of help from the community?
I also wish you a continued healthy life and thanks for sharing your ideas and work with the world! 
Thank you for your kind words and thoughtful question! And I’m glad you asked about funding - I was subconsciously trying not to think too much about that problem 
From my experience working on Hologram full-time for almost 2 years now, I’ve come to realize that this kind of project requires an enormous amount of focused work. Working part-time simply won’t move the needle significantly. I’ve been burning through my savings to dedicate myself to it fully, and I’ve nearly depleted them at this point - obviously that’s not sustainable long-term.
I’ll be honest - I don’t have definitive answers yet about the funding path forward. But I’m curious - do you have any suggestions or thoughts on this? I’d love to hear your perspective.
I empathize with the feelings and challenges of self-investing on the project.
When it comes to funding ideas:
Have you consider these or other options?
This talk by Evan Czaplicki (from Elm) comes to mind.
@bartblast it may be relevant food for thought. And congrats! I hope to use it soon on a new side project.
I would say to at least setup simple things like github funding, patreon etc.
While it will take a big amount of small donations to reach the level of a salary, I think even a few people donating will make your life easier.
Maybe you can ask @lpil about his experiences and overcoming hurdles when working on such ambitious project. He’s inside the BEAM ecosystem and did amazing job with the Gleam lang past few years. You can also check the Lustre framework which looks to me that has similar goals to Hologram but for Gleam.
Or turn part of the project into a library with it’s own value. The barrier for adoption for a framework is very high; because it dictates how the project should be structured from the get go. On the other hand, a mere library is much easier to be adopted.
Thank you for these suggestions! Let me share my thoughts on each option:
Corporate sponsorship
While this could provide stable funding, I have some reservations about potential conflicts between corporate goals and the project’s vision. Hologram is Apache licensed specifically to give users maximum freedom. That said, I’m not completely opposed to corporate sponsorship if there’s a way to maintain project independence.
Grants
I’m actually quite curious about this option but admittedly don’t know much about grant opportunities in open source. From what I can tell looking at other projects, grants often come from foundations or organizations supporting open source innovation. Would love to learn more about specific grant programs you might be aware of.
Products & services
This feels like the most natural path forward, but timing is tricky looking at the project’s current state.
While there is a solid foundation, I think we need more adoption before products/services would be viable.
Other options
I’ve considered creating educational content (courses, books, etc.) but again, this would be more valuable once there’s an established user base.
I’m curious - do you have experience with any of these funding models? What have you seen work well for other open source projects at a similar stage?
The goal is to ensure sustainable development while keeping Hologram’s core mission of making frontend development more accessible to the Elixir community. I’m open to exploring creative funding approaches that align with that vision.
I have zero experience but this blog just came across my feed yesterday where the developer of jank-lang talks about his journey to working on the language full time. He specifically mentions open source grants, so reaching out to him directly might provide some insight into that avenue.
This is gold - thank you! Watched it in full. There’s some related discussion on the Elm forum: "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) - Learn - Elm
There is one tried and tested method that hasn’t been mentioned here. And it’s the one that has worked for both @chrismccord and myself. If you can build something that attracts enough users to build demand for consulting and enterprise support, then enterprising agencies who want to beat the competition to the next big thing may scoop you up to work on it full or part time.
When Alembic brought me on Ash was still very new, but now a lot of our business is driven by being the foremost experts on Ash. We sell a lot of support services and project work on that basis (plenty other tech too, not every project uses Ash or LiveView etc.)
The benefit of this route is that ultimately your only goal is to enshrine as much real value into your tool as possible. The more valuable, the more adoption, the more a services industry will build up around it.
The difficulty is that it is a long road to get here. Ultimately succeeding in these things is 50% having novel ideas and useful new technological capabilities, and 50% sticking with your thing beyond all reason.
(what makes my comment different is the concept of looking to be hired by an existing well performing agency)
“And I took that personally.”
You’ve had impressive persistence about Ash 
Example of corporate sponsorship I just came across: GitHub - asg017/sqlite-vec: A vector search SQLite extension that runs anywhere!
For grants, I know e.g. https://projectcatalyst.io/ related to the Cardano blockchain. In Hologram’s case, we’d need to think about which ecosystems would be a good fit, then look up grants in that area. Blockchain and AI will have several options, I imagine.
Part of the above is going trough the exercise to think where Hologram will shine, and you likely have some ideas
Double down on talking about and showing that value proposition!
I’ve been thinking about a UI components library similar to what Caleb Porzio did for LiveWire: https://fluxui.dev/. What do you think about that?
Thank you for sharing! The consulting path you described could be a great additional avenue to explore as the project matures a little bit.
Thank you for the suggestion!
I’ve just set up GitHub Sponsors at https://github.com/sponsors/bartblast
You’re right that even small contributions can help make development easier. I appreciate the advice!
Well done! I’m in, and looks like @sodapopcan too!
Yes! Plus @stevensonmt and my girlfriend haha! Thanks so much guys!
If you learn how to showcase what you have/are doing that would help a lot to get other people onboard.
Even to this day a lot of folk has no idea what this framework does (including me). It would be great to showcase where its value lies, what are the drawbacks and considerations in a professional environment. I think this is the real factor when people decide about adoption of such cutting-edge tools.
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