Niche forums are still alive and well.

I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.

> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]

Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.

I think the best way to do this today is having your own site, be it in the shape of a blog, digital garden or whatever and then syndicate, following POSSE[0], in case of wanting community or distribution.

[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I would begrudgingly suggest LinkedIn. I have seen a bunch of professors doing it there successfully. There they also promote their Substack which LinkedIn allows. I remember Elon had banned Substack on X at one point.

> would have been Twitter, but

Still is (X), despite the people who would fool themselves into thinking otherwise.

Does substack have a built in community like that? I thought you really needed to get people there or use it for the newsletter feature.

isn't it called x? why do you say twitter?

I was also a corporate stooge (at both Apple and Microsoft). One of the biggest differences in culture was exactly this point. At Apple, it was encouraged to share your successes and failures in real time across teams. At Microsoft, there was so much infighting and competition that you tended to share nothing until you were ready to release. For example, someone on the Windows team wouldn't want to give away a cool solution that could be "stolen" by the dev tools team. This resulted in walled gardens that were protected at all costs.

So long as this is about sharing on the Internet, the fun part is that no one is forced to be your neighbour. The question becomes whether you want to create the opportunity for kindred spirits to find you or not.

In a corporate setting it's a bit different, since you need to create non-critical sharing spaces where it's okay to share that sort of progress.

Seems related to the explore/exploit problem, where the standard answer is related to the answer to the Secretary Problem[0], with the important caveat that it depends on whether "passing" on an opportunity legitimately makes it unavailable in future.

But another good answer is to open the door and trust the audience. The people who show up to the garage practice are perhaps not people who show up to buy tickets.

Adopting a scarcity mindset, generally, is a bad idea.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

> Should one accept that noone will read 99% of what one shares and just use sharing as a way to record and reflect on own process?

Yes, 100%. Almost no one has found either my public code or my writing useful, but the process of writing and documenting has been tremendously useful to help me clarify what I _actually believe_ at that point in time. This is the primary benefit.

That said, a few projects have taken off unexpectedly and clearly helped some folks, and I've received a few cold emails from folks who somehow ended up on my blog, and all have been pleasant conversations!

One thing I recommend is trying to lower the threshold of what is acceptable to publish. Publish scraps, publish "today I learned", publish "look at this stupid thing I discovered" stuff. Gradually your threshold will rise, but one mistake I see people making is the belief that they have to publish finished projects and novel-quality writing in order for it to be worth it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've "built in the open" before that was a thing.

Just the fact that my Github repos are 99% public forces me to be diligent in what I commit (no secrets, nothing private)

I have like one project with over 10 stars and a bunch of forks, but that's about it. I build stuff for me, not for others. If someone can look at my crap and get inspiration, it's cool but not essential to my happiness.

Some people on the other hand LOVE the "community" bit of it, every single brain fart of them has a fancy landing page, 15 posts about it on different subreddits and substacks and it's basically a yt-dlp wrapper or something. That's not for me.

Yes. The very act of sharing is a form of "rubber ducking" [32] which will help, even if you're Truman and nobody else exists.

And even if nobody else exists, you do [99] and can later look back at your sharing and glean insights, even if "wow look how little I knew and how far I've come".

[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

[99] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59

I do exactly the second part of this. Nobody is going to read what I write, so I just write about what I did, how I did it and what I was thinking when I did it. Not everything has to be written as a perfectly cited essay, but often just noting down what you did can be helpful in the long run. Sometimes I've thought of something, remembered that I did something useful and related in the past and dug out an old article to consult my previous thoughts

I think if you make the sharing intentional to specific groups or specific people with high quality work, people will be interested.

So you can biforcate your sharing somewhat. 99% of your content of sharing will not be watched initially, but if you trim it and edit it intentionally well for an audience who care, people will come to see more of what you have.

Many "influencers" share a lot on twitch and then cut up the best part of their stream into a 2 minute video byte for youtube. As an example.

1. "Nobody" will likely read it. Don't overthink, don't be shy. 2. If you don't post you won't put the effort in to make it good. Finish your thoughts, fix your grammar, add headers and bullets and tags and pictures.

I actually made a Wikipedia browser directly inspired by Andy's blog: https://steezeburger.com/wikipedia-browser/

I find it a really intuitive way to browse notes and to get a feeling for the relationships between your collected information.

Figuring out how to document stuff for others forces you to think things through at a deeper level yourself, and that’s the main point of the idea being presented here. Forcing yourself to organize your own thoughts is where the personal growth comes from.

I don't think it defeats the purpose. Your audience will find you. Once that happens, you will start getting feedback, and then you can decide how to handle that. Closing the door just means your audience can't find you in the first place.

Fear of AI companies "slurping up data" being used as a rationale for not sharing anything is one of the most underrated harms of the whole current AI mess.

This works pretty well for physical projects but I think coding in your garage with the door open would not invite a lot of conversation or connection?

Maybe it would be a nice wfh office in the summer, though.

I believe you may be overthinking it a tad. I take it just to mean "work in the open".

As an example - at my home unless the weather is poor I always leave my garage door up when working on something, whether vehicles or other projects.

This is mainly for sunlight and fresh air but the end result is the same. Any neighbor or passerby can see what I'm doing, and in rare cases may actually be able to help or offer advice.

> If you actually have serious workshop like restoring cars or building something, rent a warehouse. HOAs have strict rules about chemicals, noise and vans parked on drive way!

I'd never buy a home in a HOA, because I don't need this guy telling me how I can use my garage. City ordinances are already good enough, when it comes to sane noise and parking rules.

I think "garage door up" means "in the open".