A few months ago I decided to start sharing more of my work publicly - side projects, half-finished ideas, things I've learned the hard way. I've been hesitant about this for years, and it took me a while to figure out why.
The honest answer is ego. Sharing unfinished work felt like admitting I didn't have it all figured out. Which is, of course, ridiculous - nobody has it figured out - but that didn't stop the feeling from being real.
What changed
I stumbled across a blog post by someone I respect, written years before they became well-known. The writing was uncertain, the technical details occasionally wrong, the ideas half-baked. It was also useful. It solved a problem I had, and it gave me a window into how that person thinks.
That's when I realized: the imperfect public record is often more valuable than the polished final product. The messy middle is where the actual learning lives.
What I'm hoping to do differently
A few principles I'm trying to hold onto:
Write what I actually think, not what sounds smart. There's a kind of technical writing that's really just performance - demonstrating that you know the vocabulary, the tradeoffs, the fashionable opinions. I want to write things that are genuinely useful or genuinely honest, even when that means admitting uncertainty.
Publish before it's ready. "Ready" is a moving target and it's usually just fear dressed up as perfectionism. I'm trying to set a threshold of "is this useful to at least one person?" instead of "is this good enough that no one can criticize it?"
Let things be wrong. I'll get things wrong. I'll have opinions I'll later reverse. That's fine. The point is to think in public and see what happens.
What this blog will be
A mix of things: technical writeups when I figure something out worth sharing, thoughts on process and craft, occasional longer essays when I have something to say. No schedule, no niche - just whatever's worth writing down.
If any of it is useful to you, that's great. If not, at least I'll have a record of what I was thinking.