I received a wonderful token of appreciation from someone who found my Emacs posts useful. It got me thinking: what would it be like if I made Emacs a large part of my life's work, and how can I invest even more into it?

Emacs is already a big part of my life. I like the community. I get a lot of positive feedback indicating I might be doing useful things. It's not like much would change, except perhaps that I'd give myself permission to focus on this, to put more eggs in this basket. I might write about Emacs more often, even if it makes other people boggle. I might tweak the design of my blog to simplify browsing through Emacs-related resources, and maybe come up with an easier-to-spell domain name for that part of my site. Focusing on Emacs is probably low-risk, since my savings give me a decent runway if I need to build up more marketable skills like WordPress or Rails. (Or I could be, like, one of the few Emacs coaches/consultants in the world. ;) )

To make the decision clearer to myself, here's what would go on the backburner: specializing in a more popular platform (WordPress, Rails, etc.), Quantified Self, helping people with blogging, helping people with sketchnoting, helping people with freelancing/semi-retirement, delegation, and so on. I could probably build up a reputation in those communities later on, but I like Emacs the most right now.

I like focusing on helping people discover the joys of exploring and customizing Emacs: blog posts, tutorials, suggestions, screencasts, maps, and maybe someday those guides and books I've been talking about writing. I like helping make Emacs learning slightly more manageable – “if you know about this, you might want to check out that.” I enjoy coding, but I haven't gotten deeply into the big improvements people are working on for Emacs 24 and later. I'll probably continue to focus on filling in the gaps instead of pushing Emacs forward.

I've been thinking about how I can reinvest money into the Emacs community. There was a recent thread on the Orgmode mailing list about donations – trying to figure out how to put people's donations to the best use. Sometimes I receive donations too. Since I keep my expenses low and there's only so much safety you can save up for, how can I put small amounts of money to good use in open source?

Domain name, hosting, etc.: I use a Linode VPS – I switched from Rackspace in 2011. A virtual private server is more expensive than shared hosting providers. I like how I can ssh to it to try different things. I've thought about lowering my costs by using DigitalOcean, but I don't know enough yet about server optimization to properly configure my web server setup so that I'm confident I'd fit into a smaller plan. (Hmm, this might be worth experimenting with someday, especially since I could set up a snapshot and save it…) I've budgeted for this and for domain naimes since this is such a big part of what I do, so I don't mind covering this myself and using donations/unexpected income for other things.

Transcripts for Emacs Chats and other videos: I've been outsourcing this instead of doing it myself because transcription is a well-specified chunk of work that I can pass to other people (who can learn a little more along the way). It takes about $35-$60 for a transcript, and then I often edit it a little. The assistant who does my Emacs Chat transcripts is interested in programming, but hasn't gotten into Emacs specifically. It might be interesting to find someone who's interested in Emacs and who will get even more out of transcribing videos. (If this describes you, e-mail me!)

Emacs/Org conference? Meeting folks in person was super-awesome. If last year's conference happened because someone found a venue willing to host us for free, it makes sense for me to pay for a venue. Even if it's over a thousand dollars, that's cheaper than a flight and visas and all sorts of other things.

Emacs meetups? Quantified Self Labs supports QS meetups by sponsoring Meetup.com fees ($144 per year), pitching in for video cameras, and paying someone to process videos. They also have people working on blog posts and other community-related projects. Would a similar model make a big difference? Maybe it makes sense to get a few of them off the ground. What's in the way of my hosting an Emacs meetup here?

Editors / information organizers: I try to make my writing easy to understand, but it can be good to have other people review something to see if it makes sense and to spot the gaps. Volunteers and blog readers help a lot. Still, it might be a good idea to pay people to help me with this. I'm not looking for surface-level editing, but more developmental editing: helping me organize ideas so that they make sense and they're in a logical order. I'm not sure if looking on the usual freelance writer sites will help me find someone who can do this, but maybe if I can offer a good enough incentive, then maybe a freelance developer/writer will be able to spend some time helping me with this. (Or I can just take longer and I can get better at asking for feedback…)

Bounties? https://www.bountysource.com does not seem very popular for Emacs or Org. I'm still not sure how bounties interact with intrinsic motivation and unequal valuing of work, or how to even value a fix.

There's still so much beyond money that I haven't yet fully delved into. Aside from re-investing money, I can invest time – and that's probably more important, more useful.

How can I invest more time into the Emacs community? What do I want to work towards? How can I improve how I learn and share?

Continue what I'm doing, and do more of it: Tweak Emacs and write about it. Be that friendly co-worker or friend you chat with because you know she's always coming up with the weirdest things to try, and sometimes that leads to surprisingly useful things. Post more screenshots and screencasts, since we could really use those.

Fill in more gaps: Answer newbie questions. Map topics to learn. Write tutorials. Link to resources. Make screencasts. Organize information. Read EmacsWiki and other resources, and organize/edit/fill in as I come across opportunities to improve things.

Guide more people towards Emacs Lisp: Help people make that jump to writing their first custom bit of Emacs Lisp. Learn more about Emacs Lisp style and functionality, and help people improve their packages.

Help inspire and connect people. Bring the community together: Interview people for Emacs Chats, so that other people can get a sense of people like them who are enthusiastic about Emacs and who use Emacs to do interesting things. Set up a regular Emacs show-and-tell series?

On a related note: what would it take to figure out how to do Emacs coaching properly? I'd want to keep track of people's progress and set up recurring calls, so probably Org, maybe in Google Drive or Git… I have a little bit of an impostor syndrome around this because I don't know enough about setting up Emacs as a modern IDE, but I can learn. Clojure, Rails are probably good starting points, and there's Emacs Lisp itself. On the other hand, if I answer questions in newsgroups and mailing lists, I help more people, and it's easier (and more reliable) to turn those into blog posts. Plus they're searchable. But sometimes one-on-one real-time helping is what helps me map or understand things better, and it can really make a difference in someone's confidence or comfort level. So yes, continue to do these, and continue to nudge people to share.

Do these decisions make sense even considering a scenario where, say, Emacs becomes irrelevant? I'll have learned more about related programming tools and topics. I'll be a better writer and teacher. I'll probably know a whole bunch of people who are happy about what I've shared and who can help me make the transition to other things as needed, maybe by sharing information or by taking a chance on me. And then there are all the other skills I'll build on the way: making sense of technical things, learning more about how things learn, and playing with all sorts of other things along the way.

Payoffs? Tickled brain, happy mastery. Besides, you meet the nicest people using Emacs. =)