Have you ever experienced solder shaming?
During the recent Pimoroni birthday video the concept of solder-shaming came up. As someone who had experienced solder-shaming I know what it feels like!
What is solder shaming?
Making critical comments about the quality of someone’s soldering particularly in social media. Often these are more critical than constructive!
What’s the problem?
For many people the Raspberry Pi has brought them into the world of physical computing and digital making and this has meant soldering! There are many great tutorials on-line about how to solder and many good kits you can buy to get you started.
Soldering is one of those things which can be quite scary; you have hot tips, molten solder and the chance to get finders singed and in all the photos the soldering always looks amazing.
So, we should definitely give credit to anyone who picks up a soldering iron for the first time, and to be honest most people in the community do this and are positive. The negative effects of ‘shaming’ someone’s new skills can dent their confidence and even put them off doing it again.
If I had listened to the negative comments five years ago I would have given up on physical computing immediately – but I am glad I stuck with it.
