It definitely depends on the platform, though. On GitHub, absolutely, work with the garage door up. But on some platforms, it's the complete opposite.
Many moons ago, I was making mod for a game and had the idea to publish it on Nexus Mods [0] so that I didn't have to bother setting anything up once I actually wanted to publish the initial release of the mod. It was not at all in a working state when I made the public page for it.
Imagine my surprise when I wake up the next day and have thousands of views on the page and a dozen comments berating me for publishing a mod that doesn't work...
Ever since then, I have had problems with working with the garage door up, even though I know that it's totally acceptable on GitHub. It's habit by now to work on everything with the garage door down, just in case...
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.
Yes, and and it might help to have a second stream for those smaller things -- a microblog, notes, or TIL section of your site (I call mine nuggets).
It helps relieve the pressure from full-length blog posts. A place to let yourself drop below a certain level of quality/polish/length. Anything to move beyond a stagnant blog / writer's block!
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.
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
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.
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'll definitely steal the phrase (with attribution of course).
When I first started using Jupyter, I was curious about the idea of turning a notebook into a paper or book by hiding all of the code cells. In fact I learned how to do it, and have now forgotten.
More recently, I just share the notebook, code and all. I've learned that people like managers actually like it that way, because it gives them a feeling of involvement, like bringing them into the lab. You can read it, use it, change it, whatever you want.
Unfortunately, the climate doesn't like me working with the garage door up. During the winter, it's cold. During the summer, condensation pools on the cold floor.
This is part of the power of a makerspace, to me. To show up and work on my own thing, whether or not someone asks about it, whether or not someone offers to help. Those latter things are where I usually focus, but the first is important too.
The funny thing is, the space really has a garage door (two, in fact), and when the weather permits, we love to work with them up. Occasionally people wander by and inquire, and get a tour, and some of them have joined as members.
Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
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.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
I've found Mastodon to be the best platform for this in 2026. If you're working on something deeply technical, there is a good chance the upstream maintainers for whatever you're using and tons of academics in the field will be active on there. Except maybe for something LLM-related, that's still firmly in the Twittersphere, even in 2026.
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.
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.
For sharing digital creations, X is still the #1 place to do it for visibility and discovery. I get a surprising amount of positive interactions there.
I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.
> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
I don't bother submitting to reddit. I would say if you want to post anything substantial, as in something with multiple posts, to reddit, it should be on your own subreddit. Only allow posts and comments by approved users though.
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.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I don't know how publicly you mean, but I do this on the maker community I'm a part of (shout out to our general maker newsletter, sign up at https://www.themakery.cc/ for fun links).
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.
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.
Goes both ways. I had a phase of trying this and found I had to invest as much or more effort figuring out how to document stuff for the eyes of an outside observer as I did on the actual task. Guess maybe the answer in my case is to not make it accessible, but does that defeat the purpose?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I completely agree. Honestly I wish we could go back to before AI. I don't like where it's taking us at all. Changing how we write code is just the beginning. Next we'll be replacing humans altogether. I've already had an interview with a soulless "AI recruiter" bot. We can't go back now of course, but one can dream.
I'm kind of disappointed that this is about social media presence and not the physical world. I am a big proponent of working with your garage door up, quite literally, and I make it a point to do projects in my garage or my driveway, visible to my neighbors. I also make it a point to interact with my neighbors if they're doing a project and offer a hand or company (if they're interested in either). This is part of how I've built community around me in the places I live. Doing things like helping someone replace a valve cover gasket and spark plugs at 11PM so they could get to work in the morning when they were already too deep in fixing their only car; baking bread and running my smoker in the driveway and then offering BBQ sandwiches to my neighbors; setting up my jobsite table saw and miter saw in the driveway when doing home improvement projects, only to find out a neighbor is a tiler and can help me finish out my shower after I do the framing; etc.
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.
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 have resistance to sharing work in a way that also still protects my interest in monetizing and profiting from the work eventually. How do you all balance this? In a startup bootcamp they asked us to not worry about theft, though I feel its borderline gullible and naive to share some things.
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!
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 leaving garage door open, just for ventilation, but I always lock the main gate on driveway.
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!
> 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 really dislike this comment as it assumes that everything is a competition and needs to make money.
If you just do things for your own enjoyment, then it’s obviously better to do it semi-publicly so that you can connect with other like-minded people or simply give online passers-by something neat to look at.
Plus, if you’re motivated by the activity and not the outcome, you don’t have to worry about competitors at all because you have no competitors.
It really depends. If you know your competitor and understand their core business, then opening garage doors can actually screw them up.
I am working in an industry where if one competitor would go open source and created decent open application, whole industry will effectively implode because end customers will always choose cheaper solution, which in case of open source would be for free.
I forget where I read this quote but have always loved it:
"When I was a teenager, I read about all of these Bay Area guys that launched startups from their garage.
I thought 'Man, those guys must be really tough!'. Why? Because I'm from Canada and working in garages in the winter is really cold."
https://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
It definitely depends on the platform, though. On GitHub, absolutely, work with the garage door up. But on some platforms, it's the complete opposite.
Many moons ago, I was making mod for a game and had the idea to publish it on Nexus Mods [0] so that I didn't have to bother setting anything up once I actually wanted to publish the initial release of the mod. It was not at all in a working state when I made the public page for it.
Imagine my surprise when I wake up the next day and have thousands of views on the page and a dozen comments berating me for publishing a mod that doesn't work...
Ever since then, I have had problems with working with the garage door up, even though I know that it's totally acceptable on GitHub. It's habit by now to work on everything with the garage door down, just in case...
[0]: https://www.nexusmods.com/
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.
Yes, and and it might help to have a second stream for those smaller things -- a microblog, notes, or TIL section of your site (I call mine nuggets).
It helps relieve the pressure from full-length blog posts. A place to let yourself drop below a certain level of quality/polish/length. Anything to move beyond a stagnant blog / writer's block!
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.
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
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 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.
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.
This is great! Thank you :heart:
This is the first time I've encountered this. I want all footnotes to work this way! Otherwise I'm off into a rathole and never return. Love it.
I'll definitely steal the phrase (with attribution of course).
When I first started using Jupyter, I was curious about the idea of turning a notebook into a paper or book by hiding all of the code cells. In fact I learned how to do it, and have now forgotten.
More recently, I just share the notebook, code and all. I've learned that people like managers actually like it that way, because it gives them a feeling of involvement, like bringing them into the lab. You can read it, use it, change it, whatever you want.
Unfortunately, the climate doesn't like me working with the garage door up. During the winter, it's cold. During the summer, condensation pools on the cold floor.
This is part of the power of a makerspace, to me. To show up and work on my own thing, whether or not someone asks about it, whether or not someone offers to help. Those latter things are where I usually focus, but the first is important too.
The funny thing is, the space really has a garage door (two, in fact), and when the weather permits, we love to work with them up. Occasionally people wander by and inquire, and get a tour, and some of them have joined as members.
Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today.
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.
Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
> 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.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
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Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.
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I've found Mastodon to be the best platform for this in 2026. If you're working on something deeply technical, there is a good chance the upstream maintainers for whatever you're using and tons of academics in the field will be active on there. Except maybe for something LLM-related, that's still firmly in the Twittersphere, even in 2026.
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
Yeah. You can follow microformats and use Bridgy to syndicate to BlueSky and Fediverse
I think YouTube can be a good place for it, probably supplemented by a simple website.
Example, Pete's Garage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQFlaDhWsck
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.
Hackaday is still pretty cool if you're into technogadgets and the like
For sharing digital creations, X is still the #1 place to do it for visibility and discovery. I get a surprising amount of positive interactions there.
I crosspost to LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. LinkedIn is the most effective.
I also blog, but POSSE is not as good as it could be.
I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.
> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
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I don't bother submitting to reddit. I would say if you want to post anything substantial, as in something with multiple posts, to reddit, it should be on your own subreddit. Only allow posts and comments by approved users though.
Mastodon and blog both sound good to me. For some, they could alternatively use twitch or youtube.
Isn't twitch or YouTube live the obvious sort of way?
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.
It's probably still Twitter.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I don't know how publicly you mean, but I do this on the maker community I'm a part of (shout out to our general maker newsletter, sign up at https://www.themakery.cc/ for fun links).
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
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.
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It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
Cause X is a stupid name
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X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.
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.
Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbPqWI90maA (Seinfeld Men love to work....or to watch other men working)
Goes both ways. I had a phase of trying this and found I had to invest as much or more effort figuring out how to document stuff for the eyes of an outside observer as I did on the actual task. Guess maybe the answer in my case is to not make it accessible, but does that defeat the purpose?
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.
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.
Remember that webcomic of the org charts of different companies? Microsoft's was a bunch of separate groups with guns aimed at each other.
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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
I'd never heard of the secretary problem, though like all of us I've been in that situation hundreds of times. Fascinating read! Thank you.
This is one of those (increasingly rare) internet conversations that might lead to legitimately better outcomes in my life.
how do you know that you are not the super critical one?
I'd love to but I'm afraid, I'll be in breach with my employer. I don't know what I can or can't say.
THe interface - or the garage itself - is huge here.
I want multiple ways to publish. Sometimes I wanna share images, sometimes I just wanna pipe output from a command and add some context.
Pretty frustrated of going into apps like X that break my train of thought instantly.
makes me want to make a blogging platform that gets your post by catting to binary at the of a pipe.
etc.
Love the title
This is one of the core spirits of open source
I really like this website and how the articles stack when you click internal links
I think the software is called TiddyWiki. https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyWiki5
I used to do that for physical projects in the TechShop days. It helped, a little.
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.
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.
It’s not a fear. It’s reality. It’s literally happening on HN right now.
Take this game, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573
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I completely agree. Honestly I wish we could go back to before AI. I don't like where it's taking us at all. Changing how we write code is just the beginning. Next we'll be replacing humans altogether. I've already had an interview with a soulless "AI recruiter" bot. We can't go back now of course, but one can dream.
I'm kind of disappointed that this is about social media presence and not the physical world. I am a big proponent of working with your garage door up, quite literally, and I make it a point to do projects in my garage or my driveway, visible to my neighbors. I also make it a point to interact with my neighbors if they're doing a project and offer a hand or company (if they're interested in either). This is part of how I've built community around me in the places I live. Doing things like helping someone replace a valve cover gasket and spark plugs at 11PM so they could get to work in the morning when they were already too deep in fixing their only car; baking bread and running my smoker in the driveway and then offering BBQ sandwiches to my neighbors; setting up my jobsite table saw and miter saw in the driveway when doing home improvement projects, only to find out a neighbor is a tiler and can help me finish out my shower after I do the framing; etc.
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.
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.
So... join the Facebook group?
I have resistance to sharing work in a way that also still protects my interest in monetizing and profiting from the work eventually. How do you all balance this? In a startup bootcamp they asked us to not worry about theft, though I feel its borderline gullible and naive to share some things.
I recommend running this by legal if you are funded, however, I am not a lawyer.
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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!
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 leaving garage door open, just for ventilation, but I always lock the main gate on driveway.
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!
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> 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".
Yeah work with the garage door up so better equipped competitors can have an easier time copying your work.
Do these navel gazing blog posts come with any life experience?
I really dislike this comment as it assumes that everything is a competition and needs to make money.
If you just do things for your own enjoyment, then it’s obviously better to do it semi-publicly so that you can connect with other like-minded people or simply give online passers-by something neat to look at.
Plus, if you’re motivated by the activity and not the outcome, you don’t have to worry about competitors at all because you have no competitors.
It really depends. If you know your competitor and understand their core business, then opening garage doors can actually screw them up.
I am working in an industry where if one competitor would go open source and created decent open application, whole industry will effectively implode because end customers will always choose cheaper solution, which in case of open source would be for free.
That’s true of quite a few industries though, but it takes insider knowledge to know what to build.