Sharing Github Projects on Steemit

It's been a while since I last posted on Steem. In the time since then, I've spent quite a lot of effort thinking about what exactly it is that I want to do with my Steem account -- do I want to blog about my life, technology, or what? Well, yesterday I read an interesting post about how we could transform Steemit into our very own version of StackOverflow. That got the gears really turning in my head, and gave me the idea of using Steemit to share code.

Github is the biggest platform out there for sharing your code, and it works great for what it does. But at the end of the day, most of those hobby projects on Github will die out after a little while because Github programmers aren't making any money off of their open-source projects. Some programmers have turned to Patreon to get funding to continue development for their framework, while others have tried to put PayPal donation links on their projects. The problem with both of these is that for all the interesting projects out there on Github, most people can only spare a few pennies. If there were only 20 or so interesting projects, people wouldn't have a problem with giving $5 a year to each one. But taking a quick look at the numbers, you'll instantly see that it's not so simple.

That's where Steem comes in. No longer do you need to take some money out of your wallet to donate to a developer. With Steem, you just need to upvote a project's post to donate to the creators. Even better, a Steemit post can now serve as a discussion for your project (much like HackerNews or /r/Programming are used), a place to document the project (answering questions and giving a basic project overview), and more!

So how can you get started? Create a post for your best Github project with the following:

• A link to your project
• A link to a Gist with your Steemit username (prove it's actually you who's gaining the "donations")
• A description of the project
• Make sure to tag the post to #codeonsteemit to help build up this community!