This reminds me a lot of Mattt's other post about empathy[1]. What stuck with me most were two tweets at the end of it: one person said "Why do open-source prog

This reminds me a lot of Mattt's other post about empathy[1]. What stuck with me most were two tweets at the end of it: one person said "Why do open-source programmers take things so personally?" to which another replied "because we're all persons". At the time, I was ruining some of my professional relationships over arguments about their open source projects, because I only looked at these from a technical stand-point. Once I started putting myself in their shoes, I stopped criticizing. Instead I tried to be that person who always makes you feel like you can do anything, who always praises and never criticizes, who believes in you and your ideas, because that's the kind of person I look up to. True, I had to ignore some technical deficiencies a few times, but life's too short. Plus, who am I to think I have all the answers? Maybe those technical deficiencies are really innovations in disguise, which I just lack the proper imagination to see properly at this early of a stage? Even more reason to overlook it and be supportive rather than critical. So far it's working out well. My professional relationships are improving, and I feel like much less of a sour-puss than before. But YMMV. [1]: http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-source/ http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-source/ EDIT: This is possibly related to my recent burnout which made it a whole lot easier to not really care about technical details and focus a lot more on the relationships and the positives. These two things happened at the same time.