Jason Helmick and I were talking last night, and we got onto the topic of expertise and respect. Kind of, “once someone really gets to that expert level, and they surpass their teacher in knowledge, you really respect them.” I disagreed, and said, “no, I respect them the minute they start contributing to the world, and helping others.”
We all, at some stage, get “outsider syndrome,” where we think everyone else is so much smarter than us, that we’ve nothing of value to contribute. But that’s never true. First of all, there’s this thing called a “birth rate,” meaning there’s always new people coming into the field. Second, no matter what your level of expertise, you’re in it, right then. “Experts” too often forget what it was like to be a beginner; a beginner knows, and can often relate things that another beginner can understand more readily.
Take this wonderful post by Missy Januszco. Missy probably doesn’t consider herself an expert, although she certainly held her own at my recent DevOps Camp. And she certainly wasn’t the only one writing about open-source, cross-platform PowerShell Core that week. But she did it from a unique perspective, one that a lot of her readers can probably take a lot from. And she did it - instead of just talking vaguely about giving back someday, she just did, and did it well.
PowerShell.org isn’t a curated newsfeed for a select few; its yours. So if you don’t have your own place to publish and share, email webmaster@ and let us set you up to write. Whenever you solve some problem, conquer some gotcha, or have a perspective on the latest PowerShell news, share. You definitely have something to offer.