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@brandon-rhodes

Brandon Rhodes

brandon-rhodes
Goshen, Indiana

I still actively maintain the two educational resources that are at the top of the list of my most popular repositories — the code examples from my Python Network Programming book, and the exercises from my famous Pandas Tutorial that teaches dataframes using the IMDB movie database. When users open new issues, I try to get them fixed so the tutorials remain in working condition even on newer systems.

But most of my week-to-week open source work is focused on making astronomy accessible to amateurs and professionals who use Python. For two decades I have been author and maintainer of the venerable PyEphem library, that wraps an old C library to provide Python programmers with positions for planets, comets, and Earth satellites. I am told that the library is at this moment in orbit above us, aboard recent satellites that use Python for some of their system software!

I spend even more time these days on my modern Skyfield library that not only produces planet and Earth satellite positions using more accurate NumPy-accelerated math, but offers a much improved API that causes users less confusion than its predecessor.

I travel several times each year to speak at community-run conferences, usually taking the time to write a new talk instead of repeating an old one. I have also been slowly building a Python Design Patterns site to bring together several ideas from my talks and make them more accessible and searchable.

I should stress that I am able to continue making open source contributions whether sponsorship is available or not. If you are forced to choose between sponsoring me and sponsoring a programmer who depends on it as their only income, you can choose the other programmer with a clear conscience. But several folks have asked recently how to make contributions toward my public work, and I’m happy to accept such thanks as you are pleased to offer.

Current sponsors 3

@reza-ghazi
Private Sponsor
Private Sponsor
Past sponsors 9
Private Sponsor
@frnsimoes
@MarkusScherrer
@agfree
@bgottula
@RusseII
Private Sponsor
@github
@ManifestStephanie

Featured work

  1. brandon-rhodes/fopnp

    Foundations of Python Network Programming (Apress) — scripts and examples

    Python 1,363
  2. brandon-rhodes/pycon-pandas-tutorial

    PyCon 2015 Pandas tutorial materials

    Jupyter Notebook 1,023
  3. brandon-rhodes/pyephem

    Scientific-grade astronomy routines for Python

  4. brandon-rhodes/logging_tree

    Debug Python logging problems by printing out the tree of handlers you have defined.

    Python 315
  5. brandon-rhodes/Concentric-CSS

    A standard order for CSS properties that starts at the outer edge of the box model and moves inward

    CSS 298
  6. brandon-rhodes/python-sgp4

    Python version of the SGP4 satellite position library

    Python 357

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$ a month

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$3 a month

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The price of an Americano at the local independent coffee shop provides a welcome treat that lets me sip coffee from a warm mug as I check for new GitHub issues, respond to user email, and answer any questions that have come up on Stack Exchange overnight about my libraries.

$10 a month

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The price of an Americano plus an omelette at the local independent coffee shop provides a breakfast that can fuel a whole morning of working on user issues or coding new features.

$20 a month

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A contribution at this very generous tier would match each of several kinds of expense — dinner when traveling to attend conferences, fuel on the way back home from the airport, and even the cost of those mundane but trusty services that keep me online and available through my web sites and email.

$60 a month

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I would only imagine this substantial contribution level being appropriate for a small business or individual who is in the happy position of earning money through the code they write, and whose current project is creating value faster thanks to support from my talks or libraries.

$600 a month

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This tier is for the small business that has repeatedly benefitted from my projects through the years and wants to offer a weighty one-time “thank you”. I deliberately offer most projects under the permissive MIT License because I want to support the productivity of programmers everywhere, not just those whose workplaces let them release code.

$6,000 a month

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Just in case it turns out that a large corporation has enjoyed using my software and wants to provide a memorable one-time “thank you”, I’m leaving open the highest tier of sponsorship that GitHub supports. I know that recurring payments can be difficult to arrange in a large organization, so this tier lets you say “you’ve saved our team several weeks of work!” with a single transaction.