Aaron Francis
Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.
“The downside of sharing is potentially someone online tells me that I'm wrong or makes fun of me. It's like, okay, sure. The downside of staying quiet is, do I reach the end of my career wishing that I had lived my life differently and exposed myself to more opportunities? That's a heavy and totally imbalanced equation.”
The Bootstrapped Founder · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2023
Context
Asked whether he wants to push developers to share their expertise, Francis explains how he talked himself out of the fear of being nitpicked or laughed at online.
Transcript
…that I thought were winners were losers. And the ones that I thought were nothing are the big winners. And it's like, that's why you're not in charge. That's why, that's why your job is to share things and not to pre-filter or pre-judge because you'll miss your best stuff if you're pre-filtering.
…more. That's kind of what I meant when I initially asked, like, how come a developer builds a creator-based product? But it's really not just for creators, right? Do you want to actively encourage developers to be more creative in the way that they share what they know or even educate people?
Yeah, I think there is like this, there's a very defensive stance in like developer communities because they've been trained that other people are going to nitpick or criticize or like well actually them to death, right? And so it's almost as if like the dark side of developer interactions is proving who can be the smartest. And the way that you do that is prove that the thing that somebody said is not entirely true 100% of the time. Or the thing that somebody said, you did that three years ago when you were working at this company. And it's like, yeah, okay. Well, I, you know, I'm talking about it now. And so there's this, I feel like there's this learned behavior of I have to be really careful of what I share because there are going to be a bunch of well, actually people out there that like kind of beat me down with the criticism. And therefore, I'm not going to like, I'm not going to share and I'm not going to put myself out there. I feel, I don't know how common that is outside of the developer community, but I am in the developer community. And so I know how common it is for us. And that's very…
Yeah, I'm glad you're doing this. And I'm glad you're doing it so publicly too, right? You had this great talk at Laricon just this year, I guess, right? Where you talked about building and public sharing, sharing the things you do to get attention, but not for attention's sake, but for the sake of…
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, I work, so I work at a company called Planet Scale and I'm the developer. I'm one of the developer educators there. So that means, that means I'm like making videos, giving talks, you know, being on Twitter. I'm doing a lot of like forward, outward facing stuff. The…
three people? Yes, exactly.
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