sucks VS selling-partner-api

This is correct, and it's why most open-source software will never have much in the way of users:

> They're written from the perspective of the developers

And I get it. A few years back I had an open-source project [1] get users and it was terrible. What had previously been a fun technical exercise became a pain in the ass that felt a lot like actual work. I was relieved when my hardware broke and I had an excuse to archive the project.

But that does create a huge gap that mostly gets filled by commercial interests.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sucks

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last?

A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks

Honestly, this was a mistake on my part. It was a demanding audience of home-automation hobbyists mostly without programming skills. The company was thoroughly unhelpful. When my vacuum finally broke, I was relieved, as I had a good excuse for trying to hand off the project. Nobody stepped up, so I shut it down. I just ran out of interest in doing free work to support a company worth billions.

I really admire the community spirit of open source But it's not sustainable if companies making their money off it keep depending on the niceness and generosity of others without giving back enough to keep them happy, healthy, productive people.

I reverse-engineered the comms for my cheap Ecovacs robot vacuum and was surprised to discover that, like some angsty teen, it spent all day hanging out in an XMPP chatroom waiting for somebody to talk to it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks/blob/master/developing.md

SEEKING WORK | Remote

I'm a full-stack developer and OSS maintainer, primarily focused on generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications, building custom e-commerce integrations (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, etc), and modern PHP/Laravel development.

I've built dozens of one-off e-commerce integrations – everything from multi-platform inventory management systems to analytics dashboards to cross-border e-commerce tax compliance software.

I built and maintain the largest Selling Partner API SDK [0], which has 3.8M downloads and counting, alongside a number of other OSS e-commerce API tools [1], and custom tooling for generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications.

I also have experience with several major web stacks (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, JavaScript/Next, etc).

My email is jesse [at] jesseevers [dot] com.

[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api

I maintain a much, much smaller PHP library[0] (~1-2k downloads/month), and I've made a few thousand dollars in sponsorships, donations, and paid improvements to the library over the past year. I don't try all that hard to solicit donations, but I do have a donate button and a request for people to sponsor the library right near the top of the README. I noticed you don't have any visible donate button -- I'm guessing if you added one, and a little blurb about why people might want to donate, you'd up your donations quite a bit.

(Usual disclaimer, n=1, etc)

[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api