Building in Public
There’s something uncomfortable about showing work before it’s finished.
The instinct is always to wait - until the idea is fully formed, the code is clean, the design is pixel-perfect. But waiting hides things for too long, and hidden work never gets the feedback that would make it better.
So I’ve been trying to do the opposite: share early, share often, and let people see the messy middle.
Why bother?
A few reasons, roughly in the order they matter to me:
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It forces clarity. You can’t write about something you only half understand. Explaining what I’m doing - even badly - sharpens the thinking behind it.
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It creates accountability. Saying out loud “I’m building this” makes it real. Projects with even a tiny audience tend to actually get finished.
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It compounds. Each post is a small deposit. Over time, a pile of honest, in-progress work is worth more than one polished showpiece.
The discomfort is the signal
That flinch right before I hit publish - is this good enough? is this too obvious? what if I’m wrong? - turns out to be a pretty reliable sign that I should publish anyway.
The things that feel too simple to mention are usually the things someone else is quietly stuck on. The things that feel unfinished are exactly the ones that benefit most from a second pair of eyes.
What changed
I used to wait. Now I ship early and revise in the open. The work got better - and, to my surprise, so did my confidence in it.
More to come as this site grows.