Receiving Kindle books as donation for my open source project

A side not, I’m the author and maintainer of the popular Vim plugin for Go programming language: github.com/fatih/vim-go It’s being used a lot in the Go community to develop Go with Vim.

Recently I’ve was asked a lot whether I was receiving donations or not. I was not. Because I didn’t need it and I thought it was not necessary. However the number of requests of having a donation option was increasing. People wanted to give something and I wasn’t providing them a way to fulfill their wish.

So I immediately thought how to add a donation button to my Github page. I was first thinking of adding a PayPal donation button. Obviously this is the button that I see the most. However for me money was not much important. I tried to think it differently and I thought what I would do once I received the donation. It was obvious for me. I would buy a Kindle book from my wish list.

Instead of putting a donation button, I’ve added a URL pointing to my Amazon.com Wish list.

I didn’t expect it to be much a thing, however since I’ve added it I’ve received over ten books in total. In average I received a book every week. It feels great, I can read books that I enjoy and people can give something back. Many thanks for all contributors and donators of vim-go. It’s a great feeling!