Pragmatism has long been lauded for its merits within the technical sphere, but as the industry grows older, bigger and takes on new ubiquitous social responsibilities, compassion opens the door to a core function that considers the end-users, editors and future developers who will inherit and maintain code that we write today.

In terms of what this means for open-source, evidence suggests that placing compassion as a central pillar may have far-reaching improvements on the barriers to entry for new contributors and for retaining existing contributors, so exploring what this means to us individually feels more important than ever.

This talk offers short exploration of how prioritising compassion improves development output, not just in terms of ethics, accessibility and addressing AI biases, but also in terms of improving technical quality, and more broadly when operating as an individual within an open-source community.