Last weekend I was down in Edinburgh for the Scottish Ruby Conference. I’ll be gathering my thoughts and blogging about that at the weekend, but this particular post deserves to go out sooner …

The final keynote on Friday was given by Chad Fowler and IMHO was worth the price of admission alone. There were many points that Chad covered and I’ll go into them in more detail later, but the point that stuck in my head was that we should stop being so negative all the time. In other words, if something annoys you or angers you, rather than going and shouting about it on teh interwebz, go do something about it. Fix the issue, submit a patch, take a positive action.

Looking back over the weekend I was suddenly aware of the amount of time I’d spent bitching about stuff. About things I thought were wrong with Rails, about things I wished were better, about … well pretty much everything. Looking back even further to the run up to the conference I remembered the number of hours spent moaning at work and at home. I started to see myself in a pretty poor light. Did I spend _all_ my time complaining and moaning?

On the train on the way up the road I started digging into some issues with the PayPal feature that we’re working on and posted the following to Twitter:

“On a completely unrelated note … I am really starting to despise Paypal (especially their buggy-as-hell sandbox)”

If you follow me on Twitter (and why shouldn’t you) you will know that that is a fairly typical example of my output. So I decided, right after I hit send that I wasn’t going to do that anymore … well not until May at any rate. ;)

I remembered that Corey Haines had arranged an unofficial “let’s be positive” thing last November called Postivember. So I decided to try a smaller version until the end of April and, in the spirit of these kind of things, decided to name it Yay-pril.

Now, I’m Scottish, self-deprecation and cynicism are pretty much national sports here. Most of our humour is based around knocking ourselves or others down. So I’m not going to suddenly become Mr Sunshine and Rainbows overnight and I’ll try not to go all Care Bear on you. ;)

What I do want to do though, is to start looking for solutions rather than complaining about the problems. To help people rather than slagging them off. To look for ways to help rather than hanging back and waiting for someone else to take the impetus.

Want to join me? All you need to do is take a positive outlook for the rest of the month. You don’t have to make it a Hallmark moment, but if you do something or think of something positive as a result, it would be great if you could tweet it with the hashtag #yaypril so the rest of us can see.

Happy #yaypril folks :)