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.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

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.

> 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.

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

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

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 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.