Why I am building in public
Before you read the entire blog post, I want you to know that this is mostly a brain dump. Alright, let’s get into it. I’ve been talking to my friends about building my own blog and using it as my own learning platform to dive into new challenges head first. While doing this, I want to share my thoughts, learnings and adventure in said blog posts. But… why would anyone be vulnerable and share their progress to the world?
Well, for me there are many reasons. The first thing is that it’s a personal learning goal for me to stop waiting around until things are perfect before it can be shared. What is perfect anyways? Maybe that’s worth another blog post. The thing is that I tried creating projects perfectly. It had to start with a perfect schedule. It had to have a specific goal. It had to have absolutely zero bugs whatsoever. If you are familiar with programming, we all know that bug free code is something we all wish to achieve or even see in real life, but it’s a myth. Nothing can be perfect and neither will this blog (or even blog post) be! I have to deal with this imperfect thing in my own way and one of those ways is writing this!
Next to this, building in public allows for instant communication regarding the subjects that are being shared. If I’m writing a blog post on a particular subject and someone else has a different view on it, it can be discussed. This is a very interesting thing to me because it also allows a community to be built around the subjects I’m talking about. Let’s take the blogpost I wrote about how I built this website. If someone took a different approach and wants to share that, I’d totally encourage that! I love hearing about other people’s procedures and it almost always has a hidden lesson in it somewhere for you to take along.
Another thing is that I’m planning to also be active on several social media accounts. By actively sharing my learnings on my own website, I always have a place to direct people too. I already mentioned the community part, but building a community is something I aspire to do as well. I think it would be a lot of fun to help each other get better at programming and build awesome things (in public!). If you want to get updated on my latest blogpost, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter. I send this email monthly and it consists of a couple blog post which you might find interesting. When I start posting videos on social media, I'll make sure that these will be included in the newsletter as well!
By writing about my process and my goals (alongside of the many programming / development blog posts), I’m hoping to inspire those who’ve been waiting on the sidelines for too long too. Those who are afraid of taking steps for the sake of failing, being too successful (yes I’ve said that I'm afraid of it being too successful too!) or just the unknown in general. Let’s start doing what we want to do and start doing it now. I’m building this blog in public and writing about my progress. Why? Because starting is already difficult… but starting with a possible audience looking at what you’re doing? Now you’re committed and you have the best ability to improve because of feedback!
However let's not get ahead of ourselves. The best thing about starting is that you've just taken the hardest step. The only thing you need to do now is... keep going at it! As long as you're having fun, I don't think continuing will be very difficult.
