I'm a lousy programmer. However, I am less lousy than I was last year, and significantly less lousy than I was 20 years ago. Even still, there's a lot of crap on my GitHub and Bitbucket repos - but I'm totally OK with it.

I am not my code.

Yes, it's a reflection of me, but just as I am not my 8th grade English paper or my college entrance scores, I am not the code I wrote last year. Feel free to tear it apart. I will be better this year.

Your code does affect your reputation, truly. It is possible that you are a bad programmer. You'll never know until someone better sees it. Sharing your code may find you a mentor, or get a teacher's critical eye and help fixing it. Pull requests can't happen until you've shared your code.

I'll steal clone David Copeland's summary of this week's "social coding scandal."

The irony is, of course, that the code in question was actually rather useful, didn't require idiomatic command line knowledge, and, most importantly solved someone's problem.

Don't let any of internet drama stop you from writing on your blog or from contributing to open source. In fact, I would encourage you to release some source code right now. Go find some, I'll wait.

Have a code garage sale. One person's junk is another person's treasure.

"I can't believe I found code that does exactly what I needed." "Wow, I learned a lot from that algorithm."

Feel free to share some of your lousy code in the comments, and we all promise not to judge you. Feel free also to share some awesome code if that makes you happy, as long as you share.