Essay
Why I build in public
For a long time I kept my work in a drawer until it was ready. The problem is that "ready" is a moving target — and while I polished, the assumptions underneath went untested. Building in public broke that habit, not because I got braver, but because the feedback was too useful to ignore.
The seams are the point
When you ship something half-finished where people can see it, they don't just see the feature — they see the seams. The rough edge you were hoping no one would notice is exactly the thing someone asks about first. That question is a gift. It tells you where the real work is.
Private work optimizes for looking finished. Public work optimizes for being right.
What actually changed
Three things, concretely:
- Faster loops. A bad idea dies in a day instead of a month.
- Better questions. People ask about the thing you were avoiding.
- A trail. The record of how something got made is often more useful than the thing itself.
A small example
This very site is the example. The first version went up unfinished, someone pointed at a layout that broke on their phone, and the fix took ten minutes. In the drawer, that bug would have shipped.
None of this requires an audience. It requires one honest reader and the willingness to be seen mid-thought. That's the whole trick.