Tell People What They Did For You

If someone does something interesting, nice or useful then tell them.

Lu Wilson is a talented and creative person who does many amazing things. One of my favourite creations from Lu is Arroost, a visual tool for creating music from live samples.

I wrote a little blog where I explained why I liked Arroost and how it helped me get out of a creative rut. Seeing Lu reference the blog in podcasts and conference papers has been surprising and gratifying.

It's enough sometimes to express that you value what someone has contributed. You don't have to subject it to breathtaking analysis or critique. You don't have to file an insightful bug report or transformative pull request. You don't have to create your own more featureful version. You can just tell people what they did for you.

This can make someone feel good and encouraged about their work but it can also help them to frame that work to themselves and to others.

I'm not just talking about "Your art saved my life, man!" type exclamations either, although I'm not exactly opposed to those.

There were intentional decisions in Arroost's design that helped solve a specific — if vaguely-defined — problem that I had (a creative block). By describing how the tool contributed to its resolution, the decisions behind the design are brought into sharp relief and — to an extent — vindicated. Productive questions emerge: what can be said in general concerning solutions to such problems?

All that is to say: tell people what they did for you, preferably soon after they have done it.

If someone responds to your work in a way that is meaningful to you then do like Lu and tell people about that too.

...Feed the loop, feed back through the loop, give back: feed the loop, a giveback loop, loopback, give the feedback then loop, loop, loop...