tl;dr:First, here's a quick recap of my open source journey: 5 years ago, I left my day job with no plan. 5 days later, I started working on an open source project called Livewire. 1 year later I started another project: Alpine.js. Within 2 years I had made a GitHub sponsors account and ramped it up to $100k/yr. Ever since I've been working on those same two projects and selling stuff along the way to fund my work on them.