I see many comments from people saying that they are more hesitant about participating in open source after this. That they have been working on some code and will now think twice before they put it out in the open. It makes me sad.
Please don't let this deter you! I know how it feels. I was literally shaking when I put my first project on GitHub. Literally. The second time too. And the third. Still am. Still scared of making a fool of myself, but I know what a great learning experience it is and that it benefits my career, so I force myself to do it. Add to that the fact that it is a ton of fun, and every single star a project of mine gets (and the stars are few) makes me proud.
I write software because I enjoy it, not to advance my career. I enjoy interacting with real users of my software, solving their real problems. Contributing to open source is not enjoyable because many of the people you have to interact with are so obnoxious, so I rarely do it. Not everybody is trying to pimp their CV.
For example today I found a memory leak in a popular open source library. There's a good chance it is installed on the computer you are using right now. It never even occurred to me to submit a bug report or patch because when I have submitted patches to this project before one was completely ignored (somebody else fixed the issue 6 months later) and the second time I got flamed (that crash causing bug still exists as far as I know).
I have about half a dozen local copies of projects related to things I'm interested in that have various improvements or fixes that will probably never be submitted back to the project, and I don't think I'm unusual in that. Most of the issues are fairly obvious and tend to get fixed eventually anyway.
I haven't made any source code public, probably a lot for these reasons. I'm been thinking lately about working on getting a QA management tool open sourced. I believe that the community will be better off if we continue to participate together as a community rather than withholding because we're afraid of getting our feelings hurt.
Please don't let this deter you! I know how it feels. I was literally shaking when I put my first project on GitHub. Literally. The second time too. And the third. Still am. Still scared of making a fool of myself, but I know what a great learning experience it is and that it benefits my career, so I force myself to do it. Add to that the fact that it is a ton of fun, and every single star a project of mine gets (and the stars are few) makes me proud.