I see where they are coming from too, and I often feel the same way; sometimes I have found myself starting on side-projects and not even telling close friends

I see where they are coming from too, and I often feel the same way; sometimes I have found myself starting on side-projects and not even telling close friends what they are about because I am scared or embarrassed to have anyone see my work in an embarrassingly incomplete state. I think one of the key lessons for me, which is very easy to grasp intellectually but much harder to internalize, is that any nastiness you receive in the short term doesn't really matter (and often comes from people who don't really matter). If you succeed in the long-term, that's what you will be known for, and all of the scorn directed at your early works will seem irrelevant. You should therefore do whatever maximizes your chances at long-term success, which includes taking the risk of exposing yourself to humiliation so that you can get better faster. It's one of the things I really admire about, say, Jeff Atwood. He's consistently bashed here and elsewhere for being incompetent, and it's not undeserved: even though I consider myself a pretty poor programmer at the moment, I can often tell when he says things that are fallacious or ignorant. And yet, with Stack Overflow he has been involved in a project more successful than most people's projects here. I would never mistake him for the mythical genius programmer, and I may be puzzled at the attention he receives or his persistence about writing topics he doesn't know much about, but when I see how he keeps writing and keeps building useful things even when everyone is publicly explaining to him all the ways he sucks, I wish I had his cojones.