Why should you share your experience with the community?

You may think you are not doing anything worth of sharing, but you are making a mistake if you don't, and we all suffer from it.

The first meetup of the LUGSpain group in Asturias (north of Spain)

Maybe you are (or have been at some point) afraid of sharing with the community, submitting a proposal to a Conference, or a User Group meetup because you think that you don’t have anything interesting, that your experiences or findings are not worth it, they are not a big deal.

If you are one of those, or you know someone suffering from those symptoms, stay with me through this writing. Based on my experience attending and organizing a lot of meetups and conferences, hopefully, you will see how wrong those feelings are, and you will find the reasons to get rid of your fears and find strength to start taking a more active role in the community.

TL;DR everyone has personal experiences, work and findings that will enlighten and be helpful for someone else. Overcome that feeling and start sharing what you are doing because your own experience is unique and, believe me, it’s valuable to others. Sharing it will also make you progress. You will find out soon that people are interested in what you have done. 

Let me give the reasons why (and how) I have found out this is true, and how you can overcome any concerns or fears that may be stopping you. Then, I will tell you how this idea of the community roots back in prehistory and finally I will give you some hints to progress and be more active in the community.

Back when we were students...

When I was studying at the university, I remember a class in which the professor went a little bit off topic to tell us about his experience when he became accepted in the university to teach. He told us that he always considered, when he was a student, that those who got on the platform to teach classes should be geniuses who had all the knowledge (or at least IT knowledge) in the world. But then, he saw himself on that same platform, speaking to other students, and that was how he realised that while it was true that teachers had more knowledge and experience than the students, they were not necessarily geniuses, they were simply trying to share what they knew based on their research and work. And they still had to keep learning and researching.

That got me thinking that it is just a matter of time (and work) that we always have  knowledge and findings based on our own experience that is worth sharing with others. Maybe someday I could also transition from a student to a professor at the university.

The same applies to the community

I think the same pattern applies not only to university, professors and classes, but to the community, the conferences and our individual experience: How many times you have attended a tech conference, DEVCON, a Symposium, Roadshow, a meetup from your local User Group and considered that the speakers have much more interesting experience to share than you have? You may think your experiences or work is not worth sharing because they are not new, it's not a big deal, or you may think it's not that interesting for others to listen and learn from.

If you have felt this way, you are losing perspective of your own experience. You do have interesting experiences from which others can learn. Of course your experiences and work may not seem new for you! You may have been working on that project for several months or years, and you may not be surprised or interested because for you it's not new! Think of the rest of the world, who are doing different things, dealing with different stuff... your experience will be new (or at least different) to them!

Every one of us faces different problems, and even for different situations, we may find different solutions, and learn different things, and that's where others will benefit from listening to what you have to share! And you can learn new things too, from their feedback.

Sharing with the community allows us to evolve, adapt and survive

If I haven't convinced you yet, let me close with a fact that may help you understand the importance (for all of us) of sharing your findings with the community, and even may help to ease any concerns you, your colleagues or even your employer may have regarding sharing knowledge can put you (or your company) in disadvantage with others that compete professionally with you.

A couple of days ago, I was watching a documentary on TV (yes I still occasionally watch TV instead of Netflix, HBO, ...) about Human Evolution (again, yes, I'm one of those that watch nature and science documentaries :sweat_smile:). The documentary was in spanish and its title was something like "The Cradle of Mankind" (in case you may want to look for it, unfortunately, the tv channel has unpublished the video from the website due to rights restrictions).

Near the end, it relates how the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens faced evolution and why the former didn't survive while the latter adapted, evolved and survived the glacial periods that came.

It seems that both Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens weren't very far away in their brain size and intelligence capabilities, and Neanderthals were physically stronger, thus putting them -in theory- in a better position to survive.

The size of the Neanderthals brain didn’t matter as much as how it was distributed and which areas of the brain were more developed. The Homo Sapiens had a more developed region of their brain enabling social capabilities. The main consequence of that was that the Homo Sapiens were living in bigger communities (initially of up to 150 individuals but later they were able to grow to communities of 1.000 individuals), while the Neanderthals were forming small family groups of 3, 5 maybe 10 individuals.

Another consequence of that ability to form bigger groups and interact more was that they were able to share their progress and findings with other groups, and learn from others. And all the different groups were improving from those interactions.

To illustrate this, you can see in this image how the tools made by Neanderthals evolved over 250.000 years (the upper row) versus the evolution of the tools made by Homo Sapiens in the same period (the bottom row). Impressive, huh?

So the social ability, bigger communities and stronger interactions put the Homo Sapiens in an advantaged position over the Neanderthals (even though the latter were physically stronger) to overcome the successive glacial periods in the following years. The community is what made the Homo Sapiens progress faster and survive.

The moral of the (prehi)story 

The story I’m sharing with you, but also what the History (or to be specific, the Prehistory) have taught us is that, if we want to evolve, adapt and be more prepared to face any changes in the ecosystem or challenges that the future may have for us, the best weapon we have is sharing the knowledge we all have with the community.

The more personal experiences we share, the more we all will learn, because all that flow of information will trigger different reactions in different people that, if they share back, will make all of us evolve faster.

Others will find useful your personal review of your findings and even from your setbacks (yeah, it’s also interesting if you even share when you were wrong).

On top of that, you will also benefit from ordering your ideas and revisiting your work to share it with others. You will review some findings that could be almost forgotten or learn back from similar experiences and alternative approaches that others have done in similar situations (and they will be more open to share back that once you tell your findings).

And if you are afraid of any questions you may receive, don’t be. Remember that you are sharing with your colleagues in the community your own experience, and that’s the best way to face a question that you have not gone through: if you are talking about your experience, feel free to answer “I don’t know, in my experience I haven’t faced any situation like that”. That shouldn’t be a problem if you are among colleagues.

Ok, I’ll start sharing, how can I do it?

To start sharing, pick one or more of these simple options:

Find and join a User Group near you

Check when they usually meet, join their sessions and, after you feel comfortable, reach to the organizers to talk about what you are doing and propose a talk. If you are not an experienced speaker, they may help you to prepare and give some advice.

Or create one, if there is no User Group nearby

The easiest way is to keep it simple and grow organically (remember that the goal is to share your knowledge and improve, not to create an User Group per se)

  • Start by convincing some colleagues and have some initial and regular meetings to speak about what you are doing: it’s easier to get started over lunch (you could set up a Brown Bag Session or some drinks after work).

  • Find other developers interested or working with Liferay near you, and invite them to join your sessions, be friendly and try to make them feel welcomed, remember that the secret is to make everyone comfortable and open to participate actively, but it will take some time.

  • Contact us (email developer-relations@liferay.com) to tell what you are doing and see how we may support you. When you are meeting regularly, we may help you to set up the meetup group, and announce formally that a new LUG is born. We can help to contact other User Groups, and maybe put in contact with potential speakers from other areas…

Reach the global community through a Blog Post

You can also write a Blog post telling your findings, how you solved a certain situation, how you have integrated with that external system, how you introduced that new frontend framework in your project, share an idea you have had, any research you have done, or just how you are using your favourite platform and technology every day.

Remember to keep it personal and direct, you don’t need to always write an essay, or a scientific paper, just tell your story, share your experience.

Help others to solve their problems through the Forums

Maybe the easiest way to start sharing your experience is through forums, where other community members are posting questions that they do have, or problems they have found. You may find that you have already been through similar situations, and your expertise in that concrete situation will help others.

If you do help them, people will be thankful and more inclined to share back their expertise with you. Maybe they have already gone through another problem that you may be having (or that you will face in the future) and they will give back the hints you need to solve it.

Submit proposals to an upcoming conference

Submit proposals to give a talk and share your own experience to any upcoming conference.

At Liferay, we have plenty of opportunities during the year:  DEVCON, Symposiums, Roadshows, online meetups, and now we also have /dev/24. But you can also try any other more generic conference you have been attending.

And you are lucky, because right now we are looking to receive your proposal for /dev/24 or the Liferay Symposium in Spain.

If you are not accepted on your first try, don’t allow that to discourage you. Conference organizers and members of the technical committee usually have a lot of submissions, and it’s not easy to fit space for all the talks (trust me, I’ve organized big and small conferences and I’ve been in the selection committee to compose the agenda and I’ve always have a hard time having to discard very good proposals). If you are not accepted, keep in mind that is not you (or your proposals) there might be a hundred reasons why you couldn’t make it, but keep it trying.

Also, it’s true that it’s usually easier if you first try to submit your proposal to a meetup or a local User Group as they meet more regularly (usually there are less problems to fit new proposals) and you will have an opportunity to deliver your talk to a smaller audience, curbing any nervousness you might have and getting more experience before presenting in front of a bigger audience.
 

Conclusion

Step in, get rid of that reluctance to share your experience, and make us (and you) learn, evolve and improve faster. Help the community to be stronger, and it will make you also stronger. Also, being an active part of the community makes you feel better.

If you are already sharing your experience through any of the aforementioned channels, I’d love to know your point of view, and also give advice to others, please share with us what motivates you in a comment, or even consider writing another blog post (that I would love to link from here).

Looking forward to learning from you!

Blogs

Hi David.

I have always been in favor of sharing knowledge, this is also one of the reasons why I started my blog more than ten years ago.  Through my GitHub account I share all my software projects.

 

My latest interesting work was published on the SMC Tech Blog and is about OSGi Remote Service (the English version soon)   https://bit.ly/3hUNqhY 

 

However, on the GitHub repositories you can see the whole project https://github.com/smclab/docker-osgi-remote-services-example 

Thanks to all the Liferay community who read my articles.

 

Antonio.

Good resources Antonio, 

 

And I've already have on my backlog to take a look at those Microservices with OSGi. Would it be great to have it as a proposal to /dev/24

 

With this post, I'm looking also for all of you to share what motivates you to share all these things and your experiences with the community. Anything that could help others that may be considering to start writing a blog post (or start their own blog), or submit to conferences, record screencasts or share in any way with the community to do so.

 

What's the key value of sharing with the community for you? I think that the experience and motivation of active and prominent people from the community like you can inspire others.

 

Thanks for sharing this David. I think it was two DEVCON's ago that the keynote speaker on Day 2 spoke about how most of us have this fear ir anxiety of admitting when we have done something wrong. It's funny how as we grow older we seem to forget that almost all learning starts with making a mistakes -- and since we all make mistakes we should never be afraid to share our stories. In fact, most of the time they don't just provide a great life lesson, they often provide a lot of humour are well.

 

You sharing your story is most inspiring. I think I'll follow your lead and do the same as soon as I can carve out the time to write something. 

I totally agree. The important thing is to share, and the good thing about the communities is that it is a safe place to do it, to learn from the comments and from what the colleagues expose.

 

Even if you think you don't know enough, the fact is that everyone's experience is a treasure. 

 

In addition, there are many ways to collaborate. I personally try to collaborate by contributing ideas and details to improve and carry them out.