Over the past few years, I've put myself out there as well, not because I'm extroverted but because there is no better laboratory test of your ideas/convictions

Over the past few years, I've put myself out there as well, not because I'm extroverted but because there is no better laboratory test of your ideas/convictions. I'd only add one thing to this approach: make sure that you are at least solving one of your own problems and that the solution is real -- i.e. it really benefits you in some measurable way. I did this a few years ago with a relatively obscure gem that solved a real problem I actually had with refactoring business logic. I put it out there to get feedback on it and was rather disappointed with the initial reactions ("You don't understand MVC!" "You've done it all wrong!"). But I put myself aside and tried to understand the feedback from their point of view. One thing that became obvious is that most people didn't see the solution as valid because they had completely different context and approach. Fair enough. There were also several that simply 'cargo-culted' mvc responses without realizing that my gem was a thin wrapper around methods that DHH had already put in Rails (so if I didn't understand MVC, neither did he! ;) And no one commented on the biggest problems I legitimately saw with my approach: thread-safety and closures on controller instances in a prod env. But none of that stopped this gem from being incredibly useful as I tried to break apart a giant monolithic legacy app that challenged traditional refactoring approaches. Maybe it's not perfect, but at least it's a way forward. So the moral of the story is: put your idea out there, expect feedback and criticism (maybe only criticism since the people who like things tend to keep quiet (e.g. the rvm story last year)) -- but so long as this thing is useful to one person (only you?), use it to make your life easier! If it's useful to others, that's a bonus learning opportunity, but that shouldn't be your sole motivation.