[stephengillie]

It takes a lot of courage for a person to reveal how they learned. Learning is about making mistakes, doing things the wrong way, and then having to recover. It's too easy for others to imply superiority by asserting/proving they would/did not make the same mistakes.

Providing a blog post is completely different, as this is a narrative composed after the fact, not a historical record of lessons. Here, the author is explicitly choosing to reveal specific lessons learned, but has the dignity of concealing the learning mistakes by which they're particularly embarrassed. They can humblebrag about the hardships of writing something cool, like a JSON deserializer - nobody need know their embarrassing hardships, such as the 3 days they spent debugging, only to find they had a hardcode hiding in the variable init section.