When I started this blog in 2012, it was at first to share solution to technical problem I encountered on my daily work, to give back to the community. Over the years, I extended the content to other projects and ideas I had. Nowadays, I get more and more feedbacks on it, sometimes good, sometimes bad, either way something always good to learn from.
I’ve always kept comments open on my posts. I obviously don’t pretend to be always right, and I’m always happy to discuss in more details any questions or suggestion as long as it’s constructive feedbacks. That’s a good way for me to learn more and improve as well.
Lucky me, most of feedbacks I had so far were fair: people asking questions or pointing suggestions to improve.
More recently, new feedbacks way more negative pushed it way further, questioning my knowledge and my expertise altogether.
It made me deeply doubt about myself and my content: Am I actually helping anyone? Am I good enough to what I do or should I just quit writing?
If not today, eventually I’ll have to deal with negative feedbacks. So it took me some times, but I had to understand why.
So I looked at it closer.
Removing the negativity part of the comment, I realized this individual was questioning the solution to the technical problem itself. To him, the solution was poorly fitting the problem.
So I looked further to understand what was missing to make him feel that way.
When I share a post, it’s often to share an idea or an angle to a specific problem. It doesn’t aim to be a guideline, even less a silver bullet to fix them all.
It only aims to introduce a concept or a way to tackle it. You probably can’t or won’t reuse 100% of the code (and that’s not the goal), but hopefully you’ll get the idea and how to do it in the future.
At the same time, some posts are linked to each other, as a series. If you are looking for functional reactive programming or for architectural design pattern, posts might overlap: it’s hard to cover it all in a decent size.
That’s where my “friendly” visitor came it, at the middle of a series probably missing the background. Regardless, I tried to see what else could make my content misfitting.
So I kept up the analysis of my past post.
Most code I share is sampled. If I can advocate specific design pattern, not every of my projects include it. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t fit, maybe it’s because there is no point if the post is focused on something else.
Finally, the last one is solution evolves over time. In the past 8 years of blogging, I’ve covered very different subjects, some might be out of date. However, this one is on me, I rarely go back to update those.
At the end, if some recent comments have shaken my world, it actually pushed me harder to create better content. I’ll try to keep it at a level than even “swift” trolls out there won’t find any saying to it.
On the other side, as any other developer, a great way to learn is from peers. I’m always be open to suggestions, reviews and feedback to make my content and code better.
PS: If you’re also a writer or a contributor of any sort, keep up the good work. Stay humble, ignore negative feedback, turn them around, learn from it and move on.
Photo credits Avi Richards