I very much agree with this author, and the sort of open source ethos it embodies.
However, as a corporate stooge I have a hard time balancing my natural desire to work with the garage door up and my "neighbors" (legitimate) need for me to turn my terrible garage band music down and only show up after practice is over (when I have a nice deliverable).
Does anyone have any tips for finding the right balance? What is the professional development teams version of working with the garage door open?
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.
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.
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.
How do you learn to share what you do, when you're not used to sharing at all? 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?
> 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.
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".
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 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 like the concept of this, but it does feel horrific to share on most social media. I already share a lot of work I do in local dev chats etc - but there's something about the X algorithm that makes sharing anything feel terrible.
Although weirdly i've found youtube to be really good in terms of getting audience for smaller works, and annoyingly linkedin seems to actually share inside your network.
There's just something about Twitter/X that is a complete shout into the void when posting about in-progress dev work that feels awful.
Came to post about the site. My first reaction to the layout was "Oh, must be optimized for mobile." Then I clicked a link in one of the articles and it opened alongside it. Very slick. I enjoy this! It enables that "wiki deep dive" style of browsing. I suddenly want to read all your notes.
I don't know if I trust this as much as I did in the past. There's lots of competition out there. Lots of AI companies that want to slurp up data. It's a nice warm and fuzzy thing to say but I don't think it helps you, it just helps competitors get the jump on you.
Could someone from california explain "garage door up" reference? Is it like pretending to be early apple or HP, and starting chip factory on backyard reference? Or some sort of open door policy?
I just do not get it. If you own a house, you have $1m capital to deploy towards business. You do not have to invite random people and dogs from street, to steal or pee on your expensive equipment.
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!
And if your goal is to reach people, there is much better way to do that!
> 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 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.
I get leeaving garage door open, just for fresh air, but I always lock main gate on driveway.
Letting random people to freely roam around workshop seems incredible wreckless, and like a pending lawsuit. The glassworkhop referenced earlier is working with liquid that is over 1500c!
I very much agree with this author, and the sort of open source ethos it embodies.
However, as a corporate stooge I have a hard time balancing my natural desire to work with the garage door up and my "neighbors" (legitimate) need for me to turn my terrible garage band music down and only show up after practice is over (when I have a nice deliverable).
Does anyone have any tips for finding the right balance? What is the professional development teams version of working with the garage door open?
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.
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.
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
How do you learn to share what you do, when you're not used to sharing at all? 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?
> 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 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 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 like the concept of this, but it does feel horrific to share on most social media. I already share a lot of work I do in local dev chats etc - but there's something about the X algorithm that makes sharing anything feel terrible.
Although weirdly i've found youtube to be really good in terms of getting audience for smaller works, and annoyingly linkedin seems to actually share inside your network.
There's just something about Twitter/X that is a complete shout into the void when posting about in-progress dev work that feels awful.
I enjoyed the sentiment, thank you for sharing.
Came to post about the site. My first reaction to the layout was "Oh, must be optimized for mobile." Then I clicked a link in one of the articles and it opened alongside it. Very slick. I enjoy this! It enables that "wiki deep dive" style of browsing. I suddenly want to read all your notes.
This is one of the core spirits of open source
I don't know if I trust this as much as I did in the past. There's lots of competition out there. Lots of AI companies that want to slurp up data. It's a nice warm and fuzzy thing to say but I don't think it helps you, it just helps competitors get the jump on you.
I recommend running this by legal if you are funded, however, I am not a lawyer.
Could someone from california explain "garage door up" reference? Is it like pretending to be early apple or HP, and starting chip factory on backyard reference? Or some sort of open door policy?
I just do not get it. If you own a house, you have $1m capital to deploy towards business. You do not have to invite random people and dogs from street, to steal or pee on your expensive equipment.
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!
And if your goal is to reach people, there is much better way to do that!
> 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 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.
I get leeaving garage door open, just for fresh air, but I always lock main gate on driveway.
Letting random people to freely roam around workshop seems incredible wreckless, and like a pending lawsuit. The glassworkhop referenced earlier is working with liquid that is over 1500c!
I think "garage door up" means "in the open".