All of my motivation to post content is non-monetary.

Almost nobody looks at any of it, but I keep posting it. Almost nobody uses my clients, but I keep building them. I was making elaborate web pages in the 90s, when there were like 10 people on the Internet and you had to handroll the HTML tags and it was fun.

I've always just done stuff, for the sake of doing it. Like I sometimes see that a park is dirty and I just come back with some rubber gloves and trash bags and start cleaning it up because I don't want it to be dirty anymore, and then it is clean and I am happy about it. Sometimes I start a clean up project that meets as a group, and cleans that park up, regularly, and then it's always clean and I am always happy about it.

I am grateful when people give me money because it helps me finance all of the infrastructure costs, but I am genuinely surprised that they ever do, which is why I never think to apply for grants. Software grants filter for people who are used to getting money for building software or think that they should be getting money for building software, the same way that beauty pageants filter for girls who are used to being told that they are beautiful or who think that someone should be telling them they are beautiful. Nobody else knows if they qualify, so they just sit in the audience and clap, when someone official-looking says, "Please clap."

But maybe that is just me.