- Be accountable and take responsibility
- Everyone cleans up their own mess, sometimes with help.
- Comparison is the thief of joy
- Comparing yourself to others is a great way to beat yourself up for no gain.
- Compassion and curiosity
- Don't judge; listen. Don't assume you know; ask.
- Dont wield weapons forged by the right to fight the culture war'
- I refuse to use soundbites and catch-phrases created by right-wing pundits in my discourse.
- Give a fuck
- The joy of life springs from caring and being vulnerable.
- Identify the goal
- Progress is impossible without a goal.
- It's better to build an intuition than it is to rely on rote practice and memorization.
- Training our brains to spot the patterns in our solutions is better than maintaining an ever-growing rolodex of piecemeal solutions.
- It's okay to make mistakes
- It is literally impossible to learn anything without making a mistake and correcting it. So go ahead and make mistakes!
- Just listen, don't fix
- When someone is telling you about their personal problems, maybe they don't want solutions right then.
- No hot takes
- Strive for what's right instead of just finding what's funny or popular.
- Perfect is the enemy of good
- Perfection is an unobtainable goal; its pursuit is admirable but, taken too far, can be detrimental.
- Practice self-compassion
- Remember to treat yourself compassionately as well; you're often your harshest critic.
- Put on your oxygen mask first.
- What good am I to others if I don't take care of myself, first?
- Stop dunking on conservatives online when they say dumb things
- Don't score points, raise the level of discourse, stop gawking at the metaphorical staged roadway accidents while someone else passes you on the road.
- There is no "just"
- Don't make assumptions about the difficulty level of things others are doing. Or about things you haven't done yet.
- User requests are what computers are for
- The computer doesn't ask the user to do things, the user asks the computer to do things.
- We're all in this together
- It's hard for everyone. Be kind to each other.
- Words mean things
- The words we choose matter and carry weight.
Principles
Some ideas I consider important enough to write down.