David R. MacIver's Blog

Buy me books!

A thing people sometimes ask me is how they can donate to Hypothesis. Historically the answer has been that they can’t - I’d rather people pay for services, support contracts, etc. If companies want to donate I can definitely figure something out for you, but individual donations are both not enough to make the difference between sustainability and not and also honestly I feel a little weird about it.

I probably will arrange some better funding options like this, but in general I’d much rather companies rather than individuals pay me.

But it occurred to me yesterday that a) There are a lot of books that it would be useful for me to have and b) For no obviously sensible reason, I do not feel at all weird about people buying me books. People buying me books is great.

So, to the point! I now have a public amazon wish list for people who want to say thanks for Hypothesis. You can buy me things off it if you’d like to do so. You shouldn’t feel obligated to - it’s totally fine if you can’t afford to or don’t want to - but obviously it would be super appreciated if you do.

Things to note:

• For now at least it will be entirely books. I may add non-book things later but I’ve no real plans to.
• I’m always up for more book recommendations to add to the list.
• It’ll give me your name and a note you can add or not as you prefer, but not share either of our addresses with the other.
• The general theme of the list is mostly going to be my research interests and other things I can reasonably claim are work related. These are quite Hypothesis centric, so buying me books from it will tend to have useful consequences for Hypothesis development, but no promises.
• Everyone who buys me something will of course get a public thanks (unless you ask me not to).
• Naturally, you’re welcome to buy me things off this list as thanks for things other than Hypothesis.

Somewhat to my surprise, so far it’s gone really well! Rob Smallshire has bought me Debug It. I’ve also been bought Combinatorial Optimization and Growing Object Oriented Software, but I won’t know by whom until they arrive (I only know this by process of elimination. Amazon doesn’t tell me anything until I get the book).