I don't know how much others think about this, so I'll post this as advice to myself and invite you to improve it.
Posting questions, code, and advice is what makes this place run, and it's a fast path toward improved skills. Perl Monks helps to evaluate the usefulness of those contributions, as an aid and motivation in learning. The community teaches clarity, pertinence, precision, thoughtfulness, helpfulness, inventiveness and humor, in an environment of safety: all very powerful attributes in the workplace as well. It also provides appropriate discouragements. Experience Points are just one of the many tools by which the community helps people to learn Perl
(p.s. ...and to learn how to teach it)
XP is therefore also a study in social engineering. The anxieties it is capable of producing in me, even at my age (mid 40s), are very real and surprisingly strong. If my code is criticized or ignored, if I make a serious mistake and I'm then upbraided for it, if I watch my reputation shrink the emotions can be dizzying. It's almost comical that all this internal turmoil is caused in an environment where nothing harmful to me can really happen.
The more conscious I am of this effect, XP anxiety obscures the goal to learn. I become reluctant to post questions, hesitant to answer because I am not merlyn or a wizard by any other name. Even in this safe environment the greatest obstacle to productiveness and even to honesty, is anxiety; and if it is also my strongest driving force, this anxiety will certainly drive me into a wall.
The analogy to what my career would be like, if it were to follow this pattern, is poignant. I am glad to have discovered this fatal threat in the war-games of XP, before I ever met the real thing in the trenches.
What will ensure that your frontline skills in programmng aren't overwhelmed from the rear, blind-sided by anxiety? Here is my arsenal - real weapons for real life - a token of which belongs on the board of the war-game exercises of Perlmonks.
- Duty - numb adamancy of purpose in a single direction.
- Helpfulness - the duty to know how to be useful to others.
- Joy - the delight in the purpose to which you are committed, and in its worthiness: in my case, learning how to solve problems, how to think effectively. This is the iron that makes a sense of purpose inexorable.
- Humor - The sense of proportion that puts the "numb" in "numb adamancy".
What would you add?
Update: what chromatic lists here, is what really matters. Adopting his attitude might be hard if I'm still trying to learn the difference between code that sucks and code that does not.
mkmcconn