Building in Public: Why Showing Your Work Matters

There’s a specific discomfort in showing someone something you’re still working on. Not the version you’d present after fixing it, the actual version, with the broken part still visible. Most people avoid that discomfort entirely. I understand why. I still feel it myself, most times I do it.

Part of it is comparison. It’s easy to look at someone else’s finished project and quietly measure your half-built one against it, forgetting that you’re comparing your rough draft to their final cut. Part of it is the pressure to look like you already know what you’re doing, especially in technology spaces where confidence gets mistaken for competence more often than it should. And part of it is simpler than that, waiting until it’s “good enough” feels safer than finding out it isn’t.

I don’t think any of that is irrational. Showing unfinished work is genuinely a little exposing. But I’ve become fairly convinced that avoiding it costs more than it protects.

What Actually Happens When You Share Early

When I’ve shared something before it was ready, a rough idea, a half-working project, a decision I wasn’t sure about, the useful thing was rarely praise. It was feedback that arrived early enough to actually change the outcome. Someone pointing out a flaw in an approach before I’d spent another two weeks on it. Someone asking a question that made me realize I hadn’t actually thought through a part I assumed was settled.

That kind of feedback doesn’t exist if you wait until something’s finished to show it. By then, you’re not looking for input anymore, you’re just looking for approval. Sharing early is really a way of staying open to being wrong while it’s still cheap to be wrong.

It also creates a strange but useful kind of accountability. Once something exists somewhere other than your own head, it’s a little harder to quietly abandon it. That’s not about performing discipline for an audience. It’s closer to giving yourself one fewer way to avoid the work.

This Isn’t the Same as Performing Progress

I want to be careful about a distinction here, because it matters. Building in public is not the same thing as constantly narrating your own momentum. There’s a version of “sharing your journey” that’s really just performance, designed to look productive rather than to actually be useful to anyone, including yourself.

What I think is actually valuable looks quieter than that. Documenting a decision and why you made it. Publishing something to GitHub even though it’s incomplete, because the code itself is more honest than a description of it. Explaining a mistake clearly enough that someone else could avoid it. Contributing to an open source project and leaving a trail of what you tried, not just what worked. Asking a specific question instead of a vague one, because specific questions are the ones people can actually answer.

None of that requires an audience. It requires being willing to let the process be visible, not just the outcome.

Why This Matters for a Community

I think about this a lot in the context of HackUnion, because a community built entirely around finished, polished outcomes ends up quietly discouraging the exact thing it needs most, people trying things they’re not yet good at. If the only work anyone sees is impressive, everyone else’s unfinished, uncertain work starts to feel like it doesn’t belong. That’s the opposite of what I want a builder community to feel like.

A community gets stronger when people can see each other’s actual process, the wrong turns, the version that didn’t work, the question someone was embarrassed to ask but asked anyway. That’s what makes it feel safe to start something, instead of waiting until you’re confident enough to only show the good part.

Where This Leaves Me

I don’t share unfinished work because I’ve gotten comfortable doing it. I still hesitate before most of it. I think that hesitation is just part of what this actually is, not a sign you’re doing it wrong, but the honest cost of letting people see something before you know how it turns out.

You don’t share your work because you’ve already become good at the thing. You share it because staying in that uncomfortable, visible, unfinished place, and continuing anyway, is a large part of how you actually get better at it. I’m still finding that out, one half-finished thing at a time.