How we should treat each other

Social rules for technologists

Last year I came across the Recurse Centre's social rules* document. Working with computers it's easy to get carried away with the incidental complexity of our day-to-day work. I've found that too often it's easy to slip into type of discourse which at best you could call 'unproductive'.

I really liked how these social rules neatly and concretely capture a number of behaviours are self-evidently unproductive and unsupportive. As a brief summary, their rules are:

  • No well-actually's
  • No feigned surprise
  • No backseat driving
  • No subtle -isms

But really, I'd encourage you to read them for yourself.


* I came across the social rules in the code of conduct for Josh Comeau's excellent CSS-for-JS course. I'd recommend it to anyone!