Hi, I am Shad. I have been a software developer for over 20 years and have worked for some familiar companies, such as Activision and Intuit in the past, mostly with Microsoft technologies going back to Microsoft Access 1995 and Visual Basic 6. I have since worked on ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Core on various e-commerce projects. Given my commitments then, I couldn't imagine how anyone found the time to contribute to open source projects.

But I started to dabble in open source in 2012, and have since made some major contributions to these projects:

• Lucene.NET - A C# port of the popular Java Lucene search engine.
• IKVM - A Java Virtual Machine and JDK that runs in .NET.
• IKVM.Sdk.Maven - Adds <MavenReference> capabilities to MSBuild. Reference (mostly) any Maven package and use it in .NET.
• J2N - Specialized collections and extensions for making the job of porting from Java to .NET easier.
• ICU4N - A port of ICU4J, the official implementation of the Unicode standard.
• RandomizedTesting - Extensions to the Random class to generate random collection picks, random text, and other useful random data for use in automated tests.
• Morfologik.Stemming - Tools for finite state atomata construction and dictionary-based morphological dictionaries.
• spatial4n - A general purpose spatial / geospatial library for .NET, a direct port of the spatial4j Java library.
• MvcSiteMapProvider - A tool to configure breadcrumbs and XML sitemaps based on routing data in MVC (5 and prior).
• jquery.dirtyForms - A jQuery plugin to help prevent users from losing data when editing forms.
• BoboBrowse.Net - A powerful and extensible faceted search engine library built on top of Lucene.Net (3.0.3).

I have also made minor contributions to various other tools for .NET and Azure DevOps, provided bug reports, made suggestions, and offered design advice, plus I sometimes haunt StackOverflow and have asked and answered several questions there over the years.

I have been the driving force behind Lucene.NET since I joined the team mid-way through porting in July of 2016, and I am now the Apache Lucene.NET Chairperson. Lucene.NET is the largest project I have ever participated in, paid or unpaid. Since it is a port from Java, working with it has really broadened my skill set, expanding into Java debugging, porting .NET tests to Java, running tests on Xamarin.Android, designing APIs for a broad audience of developers, writing Roslyn code analyzers, building CI pipelines, writing Powershell scripts, and reverse engineering the .NET platform to find low-level gaps that impact how Lucene.NET functions on the .NET platform even though it was designed with Java in mind. I have contributed more than 3000 hours of my time to Lucene.NET, and have found it to be both fun and challenging to work on.

I love creating libraries and tools to make developer's lives easier. I wish I had the time to report all of the bugs that I find in .NET itself and other open source projects and follow up until they have been fixed. But time is limited, and I require sponsorship so I can go further with it. My goal is to someday do this full time, but I need your help to get there.

Please sponsor me so together we can deliver amazing .NET tools and make the .NET ecosystem thrive!