An Experiment in Scotch

I haven’t read Cod­ing Hor­ror in a long time but I was going through my badly neglected RSS feeds tonight and ran into Strong Opin­ions, Weakly Held and it really struck a chord with some­thing I’ve been giv­ing some thought to for quite awhile. It’s a deep dark secret I’ve got, one I’ve been har­bor­ing for a long time, one that I think it’s time came out in the open:
I AM NOT AN EXPERT.

There, I said it. Whew, it feels good. Don’t get me wrong, I like feel­ing like I know just about every­thing but in real­ity, I have this huge streak of inse­cu­rity run­ning through me about just about every­thing and I’m mostly OK with it. You see, experts make me ner­vous. Peo­ple who have an opin­ion on every­thing make me real ner­vous. When I see peo­ple who lust after val­i­da­tion through exter­nal achieve­ments and acco­lades, I get down­right skit­tish. I’m never going to be a Microsoft MVP or have 5 cer­ti­fi­ca­tions or be able to say I archi­tected a huge flux capac­i­tor enter­prise level CRM MOSS por­tal. It’s just not me.

I like to get my hands dirty doing things like set­ting up builds, mak­ing sure unit tests run, facil­i­tat­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion by cre­at­ing a wiki no one but me will ever read (if I set up a wiki and no one reads it, is it still com­mu­ni­ca­tion?) These aren’t things that get you an MVP. But they are things that long term will make your soft­ware bet­ter. In the end, it’s good that I don’t want to be an expert. I’m not nearly smart enough. I make up for smarts by doing the dirty work. I’ll have to leave the hard stuff to the experts.