We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay our on ourselves- the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad, and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the additictions of all kinds- never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye from being fully awake.
from Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chödrön
In the next year, I would like to encourage our community to calm down. There is far too much chatter about how we should be focused on becoming more popular, or how we should do more things like React, or even some that suggest we should apologize for past mistakes, and/or give up entirely.
The sky is not falling, and it’s both a little disheartening and also terribly inaccurate to hear people saying this.
The goal of Ember should never be to fully align with another approach, but rather agree on certain fundamentals while providing our own business value proposition.
If individuals in the community want Ember to be more widely adopted, more understood, more popular– then those individuals need to submit talks, and write blog posts, and encourage others to do so.
I’d like to see us abandon the notion of popularity entirely, to be quite honest.
We should calmly and thoughtfully continue to improve. I’ll be clear here too- calm doesn’t mean apathetic or lazy. It means calm.
Ember is an escape from the hype train. Ember is an escape from needing a bajillion version numbers speeding along because, as we all know, higher version numbers mean that a project is awesome and modern and should definitely be used (except that it doesn’t mean that. At all.). Ember is about sensible defaults that will help teams avoid the problems they don’t even know they are going to face…yet. Ember is about calm foresight.
The Community as a whole must remember that each and every single one of us are the only ones who will excite others about using Ember. We are the only ones who can pique curiosity of others.
So here’s a checklist of things we can each do, because I am always determined to offer a suggestion if I take the time to point out an area of improvement:
- eliminate extremes from your vocabulary and gently call it out when you see it in others.
- focus on positive growth — progress, not perfection.
- share Ember with someone else! Give a talk, message someone in a DM, write a blog post. Remember that you are the buzz. What do you really like? Figure out how to get other people excited about what you’re excited about.
- practice your communication skills.
I have never apologized for Ember — or for that matter, any code I’ve ever written. I don’t think it’s particularly useful. We learn new things, we write better code. Some of it is better than others, but this is the case with all programming. We learn, we grow, we do better. To think otherwise is to fool oneself. I’ll be quite frank- I find it more than a little obnoxious that anyone would even suggest that Ember should apologize or somehow change its past to be something different — such a suggestion demonstrates a gross lack of understanding about the nature of software engineering and the reality of the world in general.
The sky is not falling, not today.