Building Things in Public: What Six Months Taught Me

Six months ago I made a decision that felt uncomfortable: I would share everything I was building, while I was building it. Not polished case studies. Not finished products. The messy middle — the half-working prototypes, the dead ends, the “this might be a stupid idea” stages.

Here’s what happened.

The fear was wrong

I expected two outcomes from sharing early work: silence, or criticism. What I mostly got was neither. I got questions.

People asked how I built things. They asked what stack I was using. They asked if I’d considered a different approach. Some of them had tried the same thing and hit the same walls.

This was unexpected. I’d been so focused on the judgment I might receive that I forgot the internet is mostly full of people who are curious and supportive, not waiting to tear things down.

Accountability without a boss

Building alone means no one is waiting on your pull request. No standup where you have to report progress. No deadline except the ones you set and immediately negotiate with yourself.

Sharing publicly creates soft accountability. Not the stressful kind — no one is actually tracking whether I ship on time. But knowing that I mentioned “working on X” to a small audience makes it slightly harder to quietly drop X without shipping anything.

It’s a gentle pressure. Enough to keep me moving.

Teaching accelerates learning

When you explain something publicly, you discover what you actually understand versus what you thought you understood.

I once wrote a short thread about how CSS stacking contexts work. I’ve been using CSS for years. Writing that thread forced me to look up three things I was wrong about, clarify two things I was fuzzy on, and restructure my mental model of how browsers paint.

I learned more writing that thread than I did in the months I’d been using the feature.

What to share

You don’t need to share everything, and you don’t need to share perfectly.

What works for me:

• Process screenshots — a UI at three different stages
• Short explanations — “here’s one thing I learned today”
• Honest reflections — what broke, what I’d do differently
• Questions — “I’m trying to solve X, has anyone done this?”

The posts that get the most response are always the ones where I’m genuinely thinking out loud, not performing expertise.

The compounding part

None of this looked like much after week one. Or month one. The interesting thing about building in public is the same as the interesting thing about compound interest: the returns are invisible until suddenly they’re not.

The portfolio you’re reading exists partly because of connections made by sharing early work. One thread led to a conversation. One conversation led to feedback. Feedback led to better work. Better work led to more sharing.

It’s a slow flywheel. Start it anyway.