Another week, another round of thanks!

I want to start off by thanking Jim Allen (my father) for being the first Innovation Backer. Innovation is the engine of a technology revolution and, thanks to Jim, that engine is fueling up.

A lot of the careful attention I give to writing was passed on to me by my father. He taught me at an early age to look critically at writing, from sentence structure to word choice. He viewed writing as your reputation on (at the time) paper. In other words, you are what you write. I still believe that today. As Matthew Butterick once said, “the written word is by far the most consequential human invention.” We strive to give that invention the utmost respect and to amplify it.

I want to thank Guillaume Grossetie for being our second Pull Request Backer. Guillaume may have been thinking about the pull request he's sent that are still outstanding o_O. His support will certainly free up my time to get them merged! \o/

I'll also point out that Guillaume recently became the second largest source code contributor to the Asciidoctor ecosystem ahead of the original creator, Ryan Waldron. (See http://asciidoctor.org/contributors/) While this certainly isn't a competition, that's a sign of a major accomplishment. Thank you for your participation and support, Guillaume!

Thanks to Peter Ledbrook for being our third R & D Backer. Moving forward means blowing things up. Peter's support helps us mend the walls so our neighbors don't see that we aren't wearing any pants!

Additional thanks go to Rei and Bernard Labno for being Q & A Backers. 👍

I want to finish off by giving updates related to this campaign. Sarah has been working on mockups for the new Backers page on asciidoctor.org to showcase your wonderful support. If you'd like to give feedback, you are more than welcome to do so. Otherwise, just know that she's hard at work to make this page happen and it's coming.

See https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor.org/issues/396

One of the goals we mention on the campaign page is to establish a visual identity for the project. I know a lot of you have been waiting a long time for this component. We are fortunate that a designer (yes, a real one) has come forward to help. The best part is that the design process (as messy as it is) is happening in the open, keeping to the Asciidoctor principles.

See https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/48

Once the process is complete, we plan to use some of the funds to compensate the designer for at least as much (likely more) than what we would have paid on a site like 99designs.com. Working in the open has tremendous value and we want to reward it.

That's all for now. Thanks again to everyone who has supported the project in one way or another (which is all of you)!

Cheers,

-Dan