Blog – Page 19 – The Renegade Coder

Now that I feel like my website has reached some form of steady state, I figured I'd finally put together an official list of ways you can help grow The Renegade Coder. Yeah, I know I have two other support articles (e.g. 5 Ways You Can Support The Renegade Coder and 7 Weird Ways to Support the Renegade Coder), but this is the one I'm going to start linking at the bottom of all my posts. If you're in a pinch, here are 5 quick ways you can support The Renegade Coder: Become a Patron Subscribe to My YouTube Channel Hop on My Email List Connect With Me on LinkedIn Contribute to My GitHub Projects Support Site Directly Through PayPal Join Me on Discord Otherwise, keep reading, so you can learn more about how you can support your favorite content creators like me! Content Creators and Their Audiences As it turns out, there are a lot of ways to support creators. For instance, you could follow them on social media where you can participate in the growth of their brand. Likewise, you could join their email list, so you can stay up to date with their content. Hell, you could even help promote their work directly by sharing with your friends and followers. Of course, before you do any of that, you have a choice to make: do you want to support that creator or not? In the vast majority of cases, you won't. After all, there is just so much content on the internet, there's no way you could support every creator. Then, there's the issue of content quality—not all content is good. That said, when you do find a creator you like, you might wonder why you would support them. After all, isn't enjoying their content enough? In most cases, absolutely! Without their audience, creators wouldn't be anything more than hobbyists, quietly honing their craft at home. In other words, they need an audience to be able to grow their hobby into something more meaningful. That said, creating content for people isn't often sustainable. After all, creators have to eat, and making money is the only way to do that. Luckily, most creators have found ways to monetize their work without having to depend on their audience. For instance, many rely on advertisements and sponsorship deals. In my case, I try to leverages ads and affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, unless the creator's audience is sufficiently large, these passive modes of monetization aren't enough to sustain the hobby. As a result, creators rely on their audience to participate in the growth of their brand. For instance, they might start a Patreon or create some merchandise. Likewise, they could offer some services like homework help or resume building. In other words, creators often have to freelance to pay their bills. Otherwise, they'll have to work another job on the side (or go to grad school like me). Sadly, most creators will never succeed without the support of their audience. As a result, I figured it would be important to put together a list of ways you can help grow The Renegade Coder, so I can continue to create the content you love. Why Support The Renegade Coder? At this point, I only think it's fair that I make the case for why you should help grow The Renegade Coder among the sea of content creators. To start, I want to share a few of my goals. First, my biggest goal in life is to become financially independent. Specifically, that means having enough money to be able to support my family while working independently. In other words, I want to be able to work on The Renegade Coder full-time without having to support myself with a separate job. Second, I want to help transform the culture of tech for the better. This is something that I've adopted more recently as I've been continually frustrated with the way people treat each other in the industry. One way I can do that is by creating tech content with a focus on empathy and compassion. Finally, I want to continue to provide free educational content. When I first created this website in 2017, my goal was to create free computer science content, so others could avoid the financial burden of education. In fact, you can even find this goal on my About page. Fortunately, not much has changed since then. Ultimately, I believe that you should support The Renegade Coder if you want to see me accomplish any of these goals. For instance, if you really like my educational content, supporting this site will go a long way to ensuring that others have the same experience as you. Likewise, if you're frustrated with the tech industry, supporting this site helps get empathy-based content in the faces of industry leaders. Finally, if you just want to help me become financially independent, supporting this site is the best way to do that. 7 Ways You Can Help Out If you've reached this point of the article, you must have decided that you want to help grow The Renegade Coder. That's great! And, I appreciate the support. Here's the official list of ways you can support The Renegade Coder. Become a Patron One of the most direct ways to help grow The Renegade Coder is to become a patron. Currently, I have three tiers of support: For Fame! ($1), For Glory! ($5), and For Honor! ($11). Each of them come with their own perks, but you'll probably get the most value out of the For Glory! tier which gives you access to 40+ premium articles on this site. That said, if you go for the highest tier, you'll get access to all sorts of great files including: A Random Name Change Discord Bot The Python Numbers and Operators Lab Other perks include having a Subscriber Spotlight article written about you and getting sneak previews to content. Likewise, I've integrated a Discord benefits for all the tiers in case you want to chat! At the time of writing, I have a small but dedicated group of patrons who have supported me for a while now. Of course, I'd love to watch that number grow as I have several milestones I'd love to reach. For instance, at 100 patrons, I'll create a Thank You video on my YouTube channel. If I can reach 250 patrons, I'll likely be financially independent, so I can start code streaming! Subscribe to My YouTube Channel One of the projects I've been having a lot of fun with lately is creating YouTube videos. Unfortunately, writing two articles a week while in grad school is already hard enough. That said, I plan to continue to grow the channel as I get time. If you'd like to help it grow, consider subscribing. At the moment, my YouTube channel is dedicated to Python-related content. In particular, I have been using the space to duplicate articles from my How to Python series. For instance, here's the video from my How to Write a List Comprehension article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEG8D4h7kls In the future, I plan to create more interesting content. That said, I just purchased a decent mic, and I still don't have that nice of a camera. As a result, Python screencasts are my niche for the moment. Hop on My Email List Another way you can help grow The Renegade Coder is by hopping on my email list. On the 1st of every month at noon EST, I send out an email with my latest articles from the week. Since I typically publish two articles a week, you can expect that monthly email to include between 8 and 10 posts. Outside of articles, I also use the emails to share additional content like new YouTube videos, merchandise, and GitHub projects. If you'd like to stay up to date with the latest The Renegade Coder content, I recommend hopping on my email list. If you're not sure you're ready for that kind of commitment, I keep an archive of 20 most recent newsletters for your perusal. As a reward for signing up, you'll receive a copy of my Python 3 Beginner Cheat Sheet. Connect With Me on LinkedIn Broadly, I'm not much of a social media person; it tends to bum me out. That said, I do maintain a LinkedIn profile, so why not follow me there? LinkedIn is the only social media I have. In years past, I've dabbled with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but I don't care for them anymore. I don't really use LinkedIn either, but if there was a platform you would want to use to get a hold of me, then that would be it. LinkedIn is basically a mirror of my personal portfolio, so you won't find much new info there. However, I do spend a bit of time re-posting the successes of others, so feel free to leverage my platform for that. Contribute to My GitHub Projects Something that I've been trying to do over the years is build up my trustworthiness by creating open-source resources. For example, I started a project in 2018 where I collected code snippets in a bunch of programming languages. Now, that project has over 250 stars and 300 forks. More recently, I decided to transition the code snippets from my How to Python series to Jupyter notebooks, so you can play with the code yourself. If you'd love to help build out that project, I'd appreciate the support! Resources like these go a long way to helping future readers. Another project I've been casually working on over time is my image-titler script. How else do you think I generate the same style of featured image for every article? One thing I hope to do with this script is build it out for other users. At the moment, it really only works for me. If you're not sure where to start, I created a GitHub organization awhile ago to store all my projects. Find something you're interested in and help make it great! Support the Site Directly via PayPal Sometimes, folks don't like supporting creators through sites like Patreon because they don't want to give a middle man a cut. If that sounds like you, you can make contributions to the site directly via PayPal. When you click that link, you'll see a fairly bland business page. You can select pay, and then you'll have a chance to select an amount after signing in. Frankly, this option only exists because web monetization through Coil died. I would much prefer folks pay with their attention directly, but PayPal works out as an alternative. Join Me on Discord Last but not least, you can engage with me and the rest of The Renegade Coder community on Discord. This was something I enabled in passing for Patrons, but I figured I'd open it up to the community. If you're curious about what type of experience you'll get, I recommend heading over there now. Overall, I'm planning to keep the space relaxed and respectful. In fact, there's no pressure to even engage from a tech point of view. There are several off-topic channels including music and gaming. Don't worry, Patrons! You get bonus chat rooms like tutoring, code reviews, and more. In fact, I'm really excited about this. Now, I can actually provide help to folks who need it, and I don't have to setup the infrastructure to do it. Discord just works. Other Forms of Support As with any list, there are always other options. For instance, you could always follow me on social media or even help my build up my backlink profile. That said, I won't worry too much about overloading you with options. Instead, I'll once again share two other support articles: 5 Ways You Can Support The Renegade Coder 7 Weird Ways to Support the Renegade Coder At any rate, thanks for stopping by. If you want to help The Renegade Coder grow, consider checking out this list (hah! Recursion). Otherwise, have a good one, and I'll see you next time!