Anthony Fu @ antfu.me

Reflection of Speaking in Public

Mar 27, 2021 · 5min

Disclaimer: All the words are only representing my opinions. None of them applies to the Windi CSS’s author nor the team.

The past two weeks have been tough for me. I have caused some drama where it might not need to be like that. The guilty keeps spinning around my head, asking myself if I made the right decisions, or what can be better if I am not taking it this way.

I guess I am still immature and naive to the community. I was so lucky to get so many of you enjoying my work, subscribing to my feeds, more than I could ever imagine. I was not aware of how the expression of myself could have so much effect on others.

I couldn’t help myself not to think about what’s the best outcome we could possibly have, if both of us could make better decisions. Maybe we can have a world that Windi and Tailwind JIT could co-exist, helping and inspiring each other, like react and preact. Windi could be the community-driven playground/experiment field to try out new ideas and ships rapidly, and Tailwind could take those good enhancements that have been proven in Windi and make it more solid and ready for production. That might be the things we should see them happen in the open-source rather than the current drama and sadness.

Not saying I think what Tailwind does is acceptable to me. I believe there isn’t something called "original ideas" - we are all learning and inspiring from others. Giving proper credit to where the inspirations come from is the least thing we can do to make open source a better place and encourage more people to share their ideas/code in the public space.

But after these days of reflection, I think I could be more mature and calm to handle this better and prevent all of these from happening. Here are some thoughts for myself to be aware of not doing the same thing again.

  • I should have more active communication with Adam and Tailwind on this thing before I spoke it out in public. Or even better before they make the announcement.
  • I should not take this personally and emotionally, and not assail Adam and the Tailwind team.
  • When Tailwind appended the mention in the comments, I should call it over and move on. Instead of bringing this up once again.
  • I should ask for the opinions from the Windi team before going public.

I had failed to make none of these, resulting in the worst outcome. I was irresponsible to do this for both the community and the Windi team who have trusted me.

My sincere apologies to Adam, the Tailwind team, the Windi team, and everybody involved with this drama.

I don’t know what this will end with, but fighting is definitely not something I meant to see. This drama was started by me, and I wish we can call it an end. I don’t really want to see such things happening again, but I truly wish I can handle it better next time taking the lesson I have learned today. After all, I still believe people here in open source are with good willing to make things better for everyone.

Thank you for reading through. And hope you could understand and forgive this naive and immature boy.

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