Building in the open
I used to think you build in private and reveal the finished thing later. That plan never worked for me, so I stopped using it.
For years I believed the right way to build something was to go quiet, work on it in private, and come back later with a finished product. Disappear, then return with the big reveal. It sounded smart. It felt safe.
It also never happened. Not once. The project I was hiding never got to the reveal. It just sat there in a folder, half done, while I told myself I would get back to it when it was ready. It was never ready, because nobody was waiting on it and nobody knew it existed.
So I am doing the opposite now. This site is where I show the work while it is still rough. The ideas I am not sure about. The decisions I keep changing. The parts that are broken. If you read something here and it sounds unfinished, that is because it is. That is the point.
There is a simple reason this works better for me. When the work is private, I am the only person it answers to, and I am very good at letting myself off the hook. When the work is out where someone might see it, I finish it. Not because I am performing, but because an idea you have said out loud is harder to abandon than one you only thought about.
People worry that sharing early makes you look like you do not know what you are doing. Most of the time, you do not know what you are doing. That is normal. The phone in your pocket went through a thousand ugly versions before it looked obvious. The clean version is the last step, not the first one. Hiding the first ninety nine steps does not make you better at the work. It just makes you slower and more alone.
So here is what to expect. Every couple of weeks I will write up something I am actually working through. A product call for Ivadra. A lesson from the sales floor. Something school taught me that I did not see coming. Not a victory lap. The real version, with the parts that did not work left in.
If you are building something too, maybe some of it helps. And if it does not, that is fine. I am mostly writing this for the version of me from a year ago, who needed to read it and could not find it anywhere.