“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.” — David Hare

Most engineers I know wait too long to share their work. They want the code to be clean, the documentation to be complete, the API to be stable. I’ve done the same.

The problem isn’t perfectionism, exactly. It’s that we confuse the thing being done with the thing being shared. Those are two different things.

The cost of waiting

When you wait until something is finished before talking about it, you lose all the interesting parts - the wrong turns, the rewrites, the moments where the problem changed shape under your hands. The final version is the least interesting version of almost any piece of software.

More practically: you also lose feedback. The people who would have helped you avoid that wrong turn aren’t watching. They don’t know you’re working on it.

What “in public” actually means

Building in public doesn’t mean you have to livestream everything that you do. It means making your thinking visible - writing a post when you hit a weird bug, sharing an architecture decision before it’s settled, noting what you learned from a failed approach.

The audience doesn’t matter much. Writing it down at all forces you to articulate the thing you’re doing, which is worth it even if nobody reads it.

The identity piece

There’s a secondary benefit that took me longer to recognize: it becomes a record of who you are as an engineer. Not the curated, retrospective version - the actual thing, in motion.

This site is my attempt at that. Work in progress.