A few bumps and bruises to ones ego in the first week is par for the course around here... When I first started posting about six months ago, I thought I was a very good perl programmer. I soon realized that I had (and still have) a ton of stuff to learn about perl and about good coding practices in general.

Putting your code up for public scrutiny is a somewhat harrowing experience. Code that gets shared needs to meet higher standards than code that is only used in one place. So people around here are probably tougher than your average QA guy, but their advice is much more valuable as well. If you can swallow your pride long enough to understand that its not personal you'll benefit immensely in the long run.

One thing you might want to do if you feel affronted by an individual is to read some of their other posts. For one thing, it will give you a better feel for their posting style. For another, you can look at their really old posts and see how far they've come... Its quite likely that the suggestions they make to you today are from lessons they learned on perlmonks yesterday. ;-)

As a personal testament, I've improved my perl more in the past 6 months hanging out here, than I did in my previous 6 years coding perl.

-Blake