Building in Public Is Hard. Do It Anyway.

There's a developer, maybe you know them, maybe you are them, who's been working on the same side project for eight months. It's actually good. Genuinely interesting. The kind of thing that would get real feedback if anyone saw it. But nobody has. Because it's not ready. There's still that one bug. The UI needs polish. The README isn't written. The project never ships publicly. Six months later it gets abandoned. Another one starts. The cycle continues. This isn't imposter syndrome. It's a rational response to an irrational standard, the idea that sharing something means it has to be finished.

What Building in Public Actually Does

The popular framing is that building in public helps you grow an audience. That's true but it's the wrong reason to start, especially early. What building in public actually does, immediately, regardless of audience, is create accountability through commitment. When you tell the internet you're working on something, you've made a small public promise. That promise has weight. More weight than the private intention you make to yourself and quietly abandon.

It also creates a forcing function: if you're going to post about what you built today, you have to have built something today. The post becomes the reason to keep moving. And it creates a record. Six months of showing your work in public isn't just content, it's a map of how you think, what you struggled with, what clicked, and how you grew.

The compounding nobody talks about

Credibility in public compounds the same way skills compound in private, slowly at first, then undeniably. A developer with 60 posts showing real work across 6 months communicates something that a polished portfolio can't: they show up. Consistently. Under real conditions. That signal is rare. Most developers share nothing. The ones who share something, even imperfect things, stand out immediately.

The Part That's Actually Hard

Here's the honest version: building in public is uncomfortable. Not mildly uncomfortable, genuinely uncomfortable, especially at the start. Your first posts will get no engagement. Zero. You'll share something you worked hard on and hear nothing back. This feels bad. It feels like proof that you shouldn't have bothered. It isn't. It's just the early stage of everything. Every developer who now has an audience went through the same silence. The difference between those who built something and those who didn't is not talent or luck, it's whether they kept posting through the silence.

What the Minimum Viable Post Looks Like

You don't need threads. You don't need a blog. The minimum viable post is two sentences. One about what you built or learned today. One about what surprised you, confused you, or broke in an interesting way. That's it. That's enough to start the record and the accountability loop. It's small enough that there's no excuse not to do it. Over time, the posts get better because your thinking gets better. But you can't skip to the good posts. You have to write the awkward ones first.