Why I Bother Writing in Public

For a long time I didn't post anything. The internal argument was the usual one: who needs another tech voice on the timeline, the algorithm rewards fluff, my work should speak for itself.

A year of actually writing in public has made me think every part of that argument was wrong.

What writing publicly actually does

The naive read is that you write to be seen. That's a small part of it, and not the most useful part.

The real returns showed up somewhere else:

Writing forces you to understand. You cannot write a clear paragraph about something you only half understand. Trying to compress a lesson into 200 words exposes every fuzzy edge of your own thinking. I've learned more about my own work from writing about it than from doing it.

Writing is the only thing recommendations can attach to. A stranger cannot recommend your private brilliance. They can recommend a post they read three months ago that stuck with them. If you want opportunities to find you while you sleep, you need a body of public work for them to attach to.

Writing builds the audience you'll need before you need it. Most people start writing the day they're trying to launch something, sell something, or hire someone. By then it's too late. The audience that shows up for you is the one you've been quietly building for two years before you needed it.

The mistake I made for too long

I waited until I had something important to say. That's a trap. The bar you're imagining doesn't exist. Most of what's published online is forgettable, and that's fine — the act of publishing is the muscle, not any individual post.

The thing that actually grew an audience wasn't the polished essays. It was the small, consistent observations from work I was doing anyway. The lesson from a difficult client. The mistake I made in a code review. The shift in how I think about a problem after a year of repetition.

None of those felt important when I wrote them. Some of them landed harder than the things I spent days on. The pattern is consistent enough that I've stopped trying to predict which posts will work.

The honest version of "build in public"

I don't believe in performing your work. I believe in publishing what you've actually learned, in your actual voice, at a cadence you can sustain for years rather than weeks.

That looks like:

• One observation per week, even if it's short
• A longer essay every month or two, when something genuinely needs the room
• Saying things you actually believe, not the consensus take
• Engaging in comments like the people there are real, because they are

That's the entire system. There is no growth hack version of it that compounds for more than six months.

What stopped me, and what I'd say now

The thing that kept me silent for a long time was a quiet fear that publishing meant claiming expertise I didn't have. I now think that gets it backwards. Publishing is how expertise gets built — by being forced to defend, refine, and revise ideas in public, instead of letting them rot privately as half-formed instincts.

If you've been thinking about writing, this is the only useful advice I have: start now. Not for the numbers. For the version of your thinking that exists on the other side of writing it down.

That's the actual prize. Everything else is a side effect.