Building in Public, and the Fear of Being Seen

For a while I worked a 9-to-5 at CERN. It was the kind of job that looks impressive when you say it out loud, and in many ways it was. But somewhere along the way I noticed that the part of me that used to love building things on my own had gone quiet. I was contributing to something enormous, which is its own kind of reward, but the feeling of taking an idea from nothing to something with my own hands had faded into the background.

About six months ago I started building in public, and that feeling came back almost immediately. It surprised me how fast it returned, like it had been waiting the whole time.

The feeling of turning ideas into things

On a good day, building on your own feels a little like having a superpower. You think of something in the morning and by the evening a version of it exists in the world. There's no roadmap meeting, no approval chain, no waiting. Just you, the idea, and however far you can push it before you get tired.

But that freedom comes with a quiet danger. When you can build anything, the hard question stops being can I do this and becomes should I. Not every idea deserves your time, and the feeling of being able to make anything real can trick you into making the wrong things. I've had to develop a sense of criticism alongside the enthusiasm, a way of stepping back and asking whether the thing I'm excited about is actually worth the weeks it will take to build it well.

That balance, between the part of me that wants to build everything and the part that has to decide what's worth building, is something I'm still learning.

The part that's actually hard

The hardest part of building in public, for me, isn't the silence when something I share gets no response. It's the vulnerability of showing work before it's finished.

I put a lot of pressure on myself to have things be good, and not just from the user's perspective. I care deeply about architecture, even on small products. Especially on small products, if I'm honest. There's a voice in my head that insists the foundation has to be right, that the structure underneath has to hold up to scrutiny, even when nobody is going to look at it but me. Building in public turns that voice up, because now there's at least the possibility that someone will look.

So sharing an unfinished thing feels like exposing two things at once: the product, and the developer behind it. The user sees whether the thing works. But another developer might see the choices I made underneath, and that's the part that makes me want to polish endlessly before I show anything.

What I'm learning to make peace with

The thing about caring that much about architecture is that it can become a way of hiding. If the foundation is never quite good enough, you never have to ship. Perfectionism dressed up as craftsmanship is still perfectionism, and it still keeps you from putting things into the world.

Building in public has been slowly teaching me that shared and imperfect beats polished and private. The feedback I get from showing something early is worth more than the comfort of keeping it hidden until it meets a standard that, honestly, only I can see. The architecture still matters. But it matters in service of shipping, not as an excuse to avoid it.

Six months in, I haven't fully resolved the tension. I still feel the pull to polish, still feel exposed every time I share something that isn't quite where I want it. But the passion I thought I'd lost is back, and it turns out it was never really about the job I left. It was about building things with my own hands and being brave enough to let people see them.