Recently I attended WordCamp SF, a 2 day collaborative conference on all things WordPress. Being new to the WordPress community, with numerous stories of it being very ‘cliquey’ and cult-like, I was worried about fitting in and speaking the language of these WordPress experts. Fortunately these fears were misplaced, instead I found a wonderful community of passionate people excited to help each other learn, swap ideas and share stories of success and failure. It was inspiring to see people from all walks of life coming together to advance the Internet and the WordPress mission ‘to democratize publishing’.
Amongst all the really great content, one talk in particular stood out: New to WordPress Development.
The speaker Mickey Kay had asked some Web Development experts the following question:
When coding what % of the time do you know exactly how to do something?
The Answer? 42% – that’s less than half the time!
This was so stunning I had to share it on Twitter…
 |
This statement must have struck a chord as it rippled through the twittersphere with 100’s of RT’s and Faves. Being really surprised by this response I thought it worthy of of further exploration.
Why did this comment resonate with so many people?
For many of us there is a constant fear of being “found out”. The dirty little secret that you ‘borrowed’ a few lines of code being discovered by your boss, your client, or your peers, and that somehow this will devalue your work. We constantly worry that people will see us as amateurs who stumble across our answers by hacking until we get it right, rather than the professional who knows exactly what they are doing at all times. So to find out that not even the experts know what they are doing all of the time (or even most of the time) is very comforting.
We think of an expert as someone who knows everything there is to know about a subject, a master of their craft. But here’s the real secret, the Internet is evolving so fast that there are no ‘experts’, there can’t be. The internet never stops growing, morphing and evolving, it is the embodiment of billions of ideas, a collective consciousness that can never be mastered, only learnt from.
 |
The reality is Web Development is more science than art and that means following the scientific methods of establishing theories, testing them, and assessing the results. The Internet doesn’t move forward in leaps and bounds. It edges forward one line of code at a time, slowly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible by constantly blending new and old ideas and concepts to produce a desired result.
This is precisely the principles that WordPress, perhaps the most powerful open-source project in the world, is built on. A global community evolving by sharing ideas, constantly adding to, modifying, and testing (and fixing!) each others’ code. Incorporating new ideas and technologies to create something that no one person alone could imagine.
So don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know all the answers all the time. This doesn’t mean that you don’t know what you are doing. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The fact that you can ‘borrow’ disparate ideas from multiple places and mash them up to create something functional is in itself quite masterful. Indeed, take comfort in the knowledge that you can’t ever become an ‘expert’ at Web Development. No one can. The best you can do is keep learning and trying something new everyday. As long as you’re learning, you are an expert.
No comments:
Post a Comment