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Analyzed from 2164 words in the discussion.
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#open#sharing#garage#door#don#twitter#something#working#doing#someone
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 2164 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it].
Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else?
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.
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.
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.
Still is (X), despite the people who would fool themselves into thinking otherwise.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 find it a really intuitive way to browse notes and to get a feeling for the relationships between your collected information.
Take this game, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698455
Within an hour, someone had cloned the game with addition mechanics that multiple people mentioned they like more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573
I have found a lot of value in being open to other people, when I'm actively engaged in something. It's not even about displaying competence or showing off (which is how I look at people doing the same on social media), it's about doing your own thing in a way which is inviting rather than offputting, so if somebody wants to ask questions, give a helping hand, or just feel comfortable doing their own thing in a way that's inviting, you help create that sense of community and ambience around you. This is a stark contrast to many places around, at least the US, where something as simple as working on your car in your driveway might be punished. Community is built, and we're all part of it, and working in the open is one of the best ways to help build community.
To that point, though, there /used/ to be a place to do this online in an honest way, which was niche forums. I wrote and posted many of the how-to guides for one of the popular cheap enthusiast car platforms I used to own on the niche webforum for that platform, in part because there wasn't much material out there so I knew I'd actively be helping others to document and photograph my work for sharing online. But now those forums are mostly gone, replaced by Facebook groups, and across the net the signal to noise ratio is completely skewed. Trying to work in the open online is screaming into the void, and if someone does notice it is actively offputting because it comes off as insincere and self-aggrandizing. It is absolutely not the same as literally working with your garage door open.
Maybe it would be a nice wfh office in the summer, though.
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!
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.
Letting random people to freely roam around workshop seems incredible reckless, dangerous, and like a pending lawsuit! The glassworkhop referenced earlier is working with liquid that is over 1500c! It can amputate a hand in seconds! The same with carpentry, my circular saw does not even have a safety conductivity switch!
There is not much danger that a random person will come into your garage and put their hand under your circular saw while you are working it.
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.