Building in Public (I'm scared)

Wow, this really isn't easy for me. I've probably rewritten the opening line about six times by now, the rest of the article is just a couple of bullets, and I've still not said Hi!

So, hi! 👋

I am Max and a couple of months ago, I embarked on my journey to become a builder. I want to create cool stuff, products that help people, solve a problem, or are at least fun to use.

So far I have spent quite some time with online tutorials (mostly this one, and the ones here). While this is fun a builder is characterized by, well building. So I have to graduate MOOCs and start shipping.

But somehow I find this difficult. The thing that is stopping me is probably an inherent perfectionism tied with the fact that my writing, my coding, my whatever, is far from perfect.

Now, how can I build cool, helping, problem-solving, and fun things whilst staying on localhost?

I can't.

And while practice makes perfect, I believe that there is more to being a builder than coding. Things like coming up with cool ideas, conceptualising and designing systems, basically all the things that make an application cool beyond the raw hard skills of coding.

How can I practice these?

By building intuition, by getting experience, and by getting feedback. This is only done by shipping. Also, shipping can be an incredible motivator. I am not merely learning for some eventual occurrence in the future, no, I am learning for what I am building now, what I will ship tomorrow.

To grow you must learn.

To learn you must build.

To build you must ship.

-- Builders Proverb (I just made up, lol)

And I will make the building process public, too. Why?

• First of all, writing is thinking. I will better learn when I write down what I did and why (and have something to refer back to, if I forget).

• Second, by making my building process public, I hope to incite a conversation, collect feedback, best practices, or just pointers to other cool stuff.

• Third, it will create some sort of accountability (I hope).

• Lastly, I will also improve my communication skills, and tackle this irrational fear of sharing work in progress (it's about time).

Let's go

console.log("LFGGGGGGG!!!!!")

While shipping this first blog post is an accomplishment (for me at least) in itself, there is more to come. My next post is about a small app I already build, so there is really no excuse (for me) to procrastinate the writing.

So if you are on a similar path or just interested in what's next, let's connect. I am definitely interested in what you have to say.

Hope to see you!

Cheers,

Max

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One last thing since I want you to learn something besides me convincing myself why I should publish this:

I made the the cover image with https://lexica.art/. It's really fun. My final prompt was

old rusty computer and monitor found in ancient shrine ruins in the jungle, covered by dirt and moss, mountains in the background, uhd, anime, 4k, whimsical, awe inspiring, vivid, mystical

but took quite some finetuning to get the desired result.

I added the font with FIGMA on top. I did not hit the perspective and then just fully gave up on it. But hey, I am forcing myself to ship imperfect stuff as well ;)

I chose this font called Pixel-Perfect because I thought it fits the vibe of a mixture of discovering ancient computer wisdom (Yes, I procrastinated a fair bit).