The act of showing poor source code either via our blogs or our open repositories can be a scary thing. I mean, we’re putting out for others to read and critique that we’ve worked hard to complete.

Sometimes we do it thinking that we’re on the right track; sometimes we do it when we’re asking for it.

In the latter case, I’d say that it’s not so scary – we’re asking for critique. In the former, isn’t it a bit more challenging when we get that criticism?

That is, isn’t it harder to deal with the criticism that comes on to something we thought we were doing right?

Of course. Does that mean we should stop sharing our code? No way.

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One aspect of growing in a career in development is knowing when to write your own code and when to use the work of others.

So many libraries available via others work.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but when we start out it’s like we want to roll everything on our own. I don’t know if it’s because we want to prove to our employer, our clients, or ourselves we can do it. Maybe it’s a mix of the two or maybe we just welcome the challenge.

Maybe it’s all the above.

Whatever the case, we’ll eventually work on larger projects and eventually become more specialized. That is, we’ll identify what we need to write and where we can use an existing library.

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