As many of you may have seen, an issue has recently be opened on the Github project Filterrific ("A Rails Engine plugin that makes it easy to filter, search, and sort your ActiveRecord lists") to directly thank the owner of project and received a lot of praise from the Rails community.
The awesome thing here isn't much the act of thanking (althought very nice and thoughtful), but rather the owner's (@jhund) answer, which clearly shows how much effect this simple "Thank you" had.
@amingilani thank you for taking the time to reach out! I'm glad to hear that you are getting value out of Filterrific. And I appreciate your appreciation.
Your comment was the trigger I needed to work on long overdue updates to Filterrific. New release coming soon!
A bit after, this issue has been shared on Hacker News and received an incredible level of appreciation from the community.
It was more than a thank you. It also gave some details about how much time it saved them, etc. That's gold.
Makers sometimes exist in a void. They create and wonder if it is accomplishing anything. They wonder what it gets used for.
A few words can speak volumes. It creates a dialogue. The maker is no longer howling into the void, no longer wondering if their felled tree makes any sound.
That hi 5 is a thunderous clap that takes their one hand silently clapping to a warm and enthusiastic embrace of connection with another living, breathing being.
Author: Mz
Coincidentially, I happened to open an issue on the JetBrains suite issue tracker, with the goal to directly thank the developer team for the latest version of the JetBrains Toolbox tool at the time, which I really enjoyed using, as I frequently swap IDEs because I need to work on multiple languages at work.
The answer clearly shows some consideration and I really hope that this simple action at least made someone smile.
Going back in time a bit, we can also find an older issue (from 2014) on the Rails project that also received huge participation from the community.
And some guys even took the time to thank Github in a repository, letting every Github user create a PR to add their signature to this impressive thank letter (I'd recommend you to take 5 minutes to ask about adding yourself in the list).
The goal of this article is not to ask for any praise, but rather to, in a broader way, openly thank some companies, communities, maintainers for their work, openness, dedication and much more, all in one place.
Now the list may be long and extended with time, so buckle up and be ready.
First, I want to thank Leo Cavalcante, the developper of the PHP library Siler, which I really find awesome to use for small-scale and pet projects. Thank you for this library, for taking the time to document it, to write the guide and more generally to just be really involved and listening.
I want to thank the BigBinary team for their many blog artices, which I found very detailed, explained, clear and helpful. You wrote a lot of Ruby articles that really helped me understand the core concepts of Ruby and, when I contacted you by e-mail with some questions about your blog, were fast to answer and very nice to speak with.
I want to thank Mikel Lindsaar and every contributor that worked on the ruby Mail gem, which really helped me gain a lot of time and simplify my code. Thank you for this awesome library, for the support you are giving out, for the seriousness and dedication you put into this library.
I want to thank Mike Perham and every contributor that worked on the sidekiq project, which helped me build a very reliable and "simple" work queue system. Thank you, Mike, for bearing with me as I was pretty much discovering work queues, Ruby and taking the time to explain.
I want to thank the PhalconPHP development team for their awesome PHP framework, PhalconPHP, which I've been an avid user of, since I discovered it. Thank you for developing this simple, clear, lightweight, versatile and ultra-fast PHP framework, which I decided to use for most of my "big-scale" projects whose requirements didn't fit with the previously mentioned Siler library.
At the same time, I also want to mention the awesome PhalconPHP community, which is a very attentive and involved community that really helped me. Thank you for taking the time to contribute to this community, thank you for having helped me all this time.
I want to thank the DevRant founders, dFox and trogus, but also the entire community (honorable mentions to @Linuxxx, @Alice, @bittersweet, @Cyanite), for all this sharing, all those laughs and moments. Thank you for making, and keeping, this community as awesome as it is ; from someone really disliking social networks, I've really found my place here and I hope the adventure will go on for a long time.
I want to thank the MithrilJS community for this awesome WebUI framework, that really blew me away with its lightness, simplicity, useability and features range. Thank you for this library.
I want to thank Trent Hensler for his awesome repository, Potato, which gave me a good laugh. Thank you, because thanks to you, I can now say that I forked a potato!
I want to thank Emanuil Rusev for his awesome markdown parser library, Parsedown, which I chose for its simplicity, lightness and extensibility. Thank you for developing this markdown parser that helped me build my blog (this website !), I just had to change a few lines to really make it work perfectly.
I want to thank the Protonmail team for their awesome e-mail service, Protonmail. Thank you for participating in the development of a safer world and for providing such an awesome web UI.
I want to thank the Gitlab team and contributors for their awesome Git hosting platform, Gitlab. Thank you for building such tools but also thank you for your honesty, transparency, which really helped me trust you with my projects, both private and public.
I want to thank Bob Nystrom for his awesome book, Game Programming Patterns, an excellent read that's available for free online, but can also be purchased on PDF, eBook and physical format. Thank you for taking the time to redact it, for making it available to everyone. I decided to purchase a printed version because I really found this book helpful.
I want to thank Parimal Satyal for his essay called"Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web", which I really found interesting and well-redacted, but also for taking the time to respond to my (long) e-mail, but also to answer all the questions I included in it. Thank you for your essays but also for your patience.
I want to thank Sylvain Lareyre and more generally JobOpportunIT, who helped me find a job for my current school year. Thank you for taking the time to help me find the right place, which I actually feel I found, and for assisting me all the way.
I want to thank Bigsool, the society I am currently working at. Thank you for the time, the help and pretty much everything (I really don't know how to put all of this in words..)!
I think that I finished this list, as nothing more comes to my mind right now, so I'll have one final mention:
Thank you, you, for taking the time to read this article, for the work you are doing, whatever it is.
Nowadays, we live in a world in which communicating have never been this easy, still we seem to become less and less sensitive to what's happening around us.
I guess that could be a phenomenon that could appear due to an overload of informations, at which we would start to become desensitized.
We tend to stop bothering about supporting, promoting each other, even if all it could take would be a "Thank you" to save someone's day.
So go give this gratitude to a member of your family, a co-worker, a friend, anyone really, and help make this world a better place.