I got an email today that CodeFund was shutting down. Two years ago I started using CodeFund to provide ethical advertising target towards a developer audience on my website. I used it as a way to supplement my income for my additional off-hours time spent on open source.

If you haven't heard of CodeFund, here's a quick summary from their current homepage

When we started CodeFund (then Code Sponsor) back in 2017, our goal was to create an ethical path for open source projects to generate funds. Since then, we have paid out over $670,000 to developers, bloggers and app builders all over the world. The relationships forged throughout this journey are more than business relationships and will live well beyond CodeFund.

Back in March, CodeFund did reach out to say they needed to shut down my account. I don't blame them. My site has decent traffic, but it probably didn't fit most of their advertisers needs.

However, within the past 6 months, we have found that this decision has negatively impacted the trust we have with our advertisers, as well as other publishers. We have come to the crossroads where we need to start pruning our network to ensure increased higher quality traffic.

I had no hard feelings. I was receiving $20 every few months, so it is not like I was a major fit in their network. I just appreciated what they were doing. I even learned some Ruby so that I could contribute. Yeah. It was an open source ad platform as well.

There was no way to request dummy ads in the sandbox or test environments. I spent some time working with their Rails application and tests to allow forcing fallback ads.

Apparently I had an outstanding balance of $36 after my account was shut down that needed to be paid off. I asked them to keep it and use it to a virtual happy hour for the CodeFund team, to celebrate their three-year effort. It ain't much, but I hope it lets you enjoy a little something.

If you know anyone looking for a Ruby on Rails team, they have a contact form up for hiring their team: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6o9yum1fXkQ_dqH5lPglzIA-PqQFRDYMQ3MDPirCaqAYc_w/viewform. See the current website for information about the CodeFund team: https://codefund.io/