Tony Zeoli

I did read that review and found that I appreciated learning about the plugin from a developer’s perspective. Having experience makes the review far more impactful. But my personal bias, which gives your point of view more credibility, lies in the fact that I’ve known about you for quite some time as a developer in the WordPress community, I have used some of your plugins, and I’ve read your support answers to others questions. We’ve also communicated personally. So, I’m going to weigh your experience favorably when I read a review because I understand the depth of your experience and would probably see it in the same way you do.

Our shared work history is problem-solving and when we see software that introduces more problems than they solve, we are going to be quite honest about them. Some people may not agree because they don’t look at the user experience the same way we do. It’s our job to criticize the user experience not for the sake of criticism only, but to make what we’re working with better. And, we can do that far more easily with software, which can be fixed more quickly than with hardware, which has a cost and intensity in physical materials we don’t have.

However, if someone didn’t know you and they didn’t understand your skill level in this universe, they might read your review as coming from a snobbish developer. That developers always have something bad to say about someone else’s work, because truth-be-told, developers are “artists” and artists have proven to be quite snobbish from time to time about the way other artists work.

But, that’s the risk you take going from developer to journalist. At the end of the day, someone is always going to criticize you. There is always going to be second-guessing and someone trying to invalidate your point of view. It happens to me every day.

They are going to hit you far harder now that you’re a journalist than when you were just a developer because you have a far larger audience now for your words than for your theme and plugins, which were targeting a subset of the community and had a finite audience. You’re now on a much larger stage where it’s not just about you and your software, it’s about you picking apart other people’s software – and for good reason, nonetheless.

But, it goes without saying that whatever path you take, someone is going to be there to offer a criticism. Since you’ve got an already thick skin, it’s just grown a tab bit thicker after this post, LOL. You’re just getting your feet wet and you’ll learn a style that works for you that may reduce the blowback.

I’ve been reading this great book, “Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side” by Trish Hall, a former NYTimes OpEd Editor. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41817516-writing-to-persuade). I urge you to check it out and it may help you reformat your approach to reviews or your general writing, for that matter. I’ve found it to be extremely helpful to me, as well.

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