Here in the US, most of us are on vacation today, the day after Thanksgiving, and if you’ve been following my work for a while, you know I’m a firm believer in taking time off.

However, writing this letter is a joy for me, and I have a little time before some outdoor adventures planned for today, so here we go. I’ll share some thoughts on gratitude (naturally) as well as my recent keynote, “A Technical Guide to Compassion in Open Source.”

First, in the spirit of gratitude, I want to thank you for supporting Compassionate Coding. Your support (responding to emails, liking and sharing posts on social media, inviting talks, sporting merch, etc.) really makes a difference for this small business. So, thank you. 🙏

Gratitude

Gratitude can be such a powerful positive force in our lives, helping us to find happiness in the present and warding off resentment.

However, I’ve observed that upon initial exposure to the idea of gratitude, unhappy people may respond, “How dare you tell me I should be grateful? Look how horrible my life is.” I saw that kind of discourse on Twitter frequently back in the day.

When I talk about the benefits of gratitude, I am in no way telling people they “should” be grateful. In fact, I try to avoid the word “should” entirely, as I don’t believe in telling other people how to live their lives. Instead, I’m sharing my experience with gratitude, which happens to be supported by research, with the hope that it may inspire you to experiment with it in your own life.

There are certainly ways to misuse the concept of gratitude, as is the case with literally any other tool.

Anyway, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here are some pieces on gratitude from the archive.

• Gratitude and a Growth Mindset in Agile Retrospectives

  This one covers the balance of gratitude and growth in team retrospectives, though it also applies to any kind of reflection or feedback.
  

• A Year of Gratitude
  I wrote this before starting Compassionate Coding, and I now credit gratitude for helping me along that path.

Keynote: Compassion in Open Source

On coding projects, it’s easy to think of users and collaborators as objects that are there to either help or hinder your work. In this recent talk at the LLVM compiler conference, I invite you to challenge that tendency, see the humanity in each person touched by our work, and practice compassion in the code, around the code, and for ourselves.

So many people came up afterward with kind words about the talk; I’m grateful to be able to share it with you: “A Technical Guide to Compassion in Open Source.”

Thanks again and have a relaxing weekend, wherever you are,
💙 April

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