You Are Not Your Code: How to Share Your Work Without Fear

The beauty of open-source software, like WordPress, lies with the community it can build and the collaboration it can promote, but with that comes transparency and making your code public means opening yourself up to constructive, and unfortunately destructive, criticism.

And putting your code out there can be scary. What if it’s not good enough? What if it’s full of mistakes? This fear, or anxiety that someone will judge your work, and possibly criticize you publicly, is something that holds a lot of us back. And the road goes both ways. How many of us have been quick to tear down someone else’s code, especially without even offering up a helpful solution?

But, thankfully, we don’t have to work this way. We can publish our code without fear of imperfection just as, in turn, we can support our fellow developers, and the entire WordPress community, by encouraging a healthy development cycle and replacing our negative judgments with positive and educational feedback.

This presentation will focus on ways to combat fears of inadequacy and judgment and to help developers understand their value and take pride in their work. It will also discuss the importance of attitude, the benefits we all gain from sharing our code with others, how we should embrace our mistakes as a means of improving, and more.