Deconstruct gratitude 🙏🏼

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Andalucia, by Pink Martini. 🎵

I'm about to leave Seattle after Deconstruct. I've written before about why I was a fan going into it, and I hope to write a more thorough follow-up after, but immediate thanks are in order:

To Gary and Brent, for organizing a conference with an aspirational degree of care and foresight. This was one of the most affirming few days I've had in the last decade and the conditions to enable this were created by deliberate decisions and excellent execution. We should all be so lucky to have an experience like this!

To Aaron, Allison, Anjana, Elle, Julia, Jumana, Katrina, Nabil, Nathaniel, Ryan, Sandy, Stuart, Tea, Tom7, and Vicky for being such a warm, supportive, brilliant group of people to share the stage with, from whom I'm learning so much 😄

To Karen, for her critically important feedback in the process, and support for all things that make a Pablo bloom.

To the attendees; chatting with this crowd was honestly one of the times I felt most at-home with a community of people in computing. Hallway chats were a joy.

To Fred Hebert for some of my favorite writing and learning materials that got me on the path to my topic.

There are names I'm missing, but this is a start!