A lot of the developers/freelancers I follow on twitter and whatnot all do a good job at what they do. And more often than not, they give away their secrets to those paying attention.
I was going to worry about giving away secrets, but then I realised if that was the case, then I shouldn’t write at all, and I didn’t need yet another excuse not to write. And one of things that drove this home was an article I was reading about some amazing hermit programmers in the early 80’s who were pioneers.
When a young programmer actually met one these hermits at a conference, he mentioned he may have given away a large portion of his graphics engine. Upon hearing this, the hermit said “A good cookbook doesn’t make a chef”.
So yes, everything I do for & with websites can easily be found online. And I want to contribute to that noise, I need to, as a way of giving back to the community that I’ve learned so much from.
But my clients have better things to do, they have businesses to run and products to deliver and deadlines to meet. They have assets to manage, ROI to measure and next year’s projects to plan.
So I’m not afraid to give away the farm. Where I live, there’s plenty of them anyway.
Leave a Reply