7 ms·
Work with the garage door up (2024)
- dmos62 6mo agoHow do you learn to share what you do, when you're not used to sharing at all? 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?
- bombcar 6mo agoYes. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging [99] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59
- twosdai 6mo agoI 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.
- theshrike79 6mo agoI'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.
- sanex 6mo ago1. "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.
- voidUpdate 6mo agoI 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
- asa400 6mo ago> 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.
- wonger_ 6mo agoYes, and and it might help to have a second stream for those smaller things -- a microblog, notes, or TIL section of your site (I call mine nuggets). It helps relieve the pressure from full-length blog posts. A place to let yourself drop below a certain level of quality/polish/length. Anything to move beyond a stagnant blog / writer's block!
- singpolyma3 6mo agoThis is one of the core spirits of open source
- endymion-light 6mo agoI like the concept of this, but it does feel horrific to share on most social media. I already share a lot of work I do in local dev chats etc - but there's something about the X algorithm that makes sharing anything feel terrible. Although weirdly i've found youtube to be really good in terms of getting audience for smaller works, and annoyingly linkedin seems to actually share inside your network. There's just something about Twitter/X that is a complete shout into the void when posting about in-progress dev work that feels awful.
- mapontosevenths 6mo agoI very much agree with this author, and the sort of open source ethos it embodies. However, as a corporate stooge I have a hard time balancing my natural desire to work with the garage door up and my "neighbors" (legitimate) need for me to turn my terrible garage band music down and only show up after practice is over (when I have a nice deliverable). Does anyone have any tips for finding the right balance? What is the professional development teams version of working with the garage door open?
- LatencyKills 6mo agoI 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.
- draw_down 6mo agoRemember that webcomic of the org charts of different companies? Microsoft's was a bunch of separate groups with guns aimed at each other.
- kristianp 6mo agoHere it is: https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...
- throwpoaster 6mo agoSeems 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- throwpoaster 6mo agoI recommend running this by legal if you are funded, however, I am not a lawyer.
- dcchuck 6mo agoI enjoyed the sentiment, thank you for sharing. Came to post about the site. My first reaction to the layout was "Oh, must be optimized for mobile." Then I clicked a link in one of the articles and it opened alongside it. Very slick. I enjoy this! It enables that "wiki deep dive" style of browsing. I suddenly want to read all your notes.
- steezeburger 6mo agoI actually made a Wikipedia browser directly inspired by Andy's blog: https://steezeburger.com/wikipedia-browser/ https://steezeburger.com/wikipedia-browser/ I find it a really intuitive way to browse notes and to get a feeling for the relationships between your collected information.
- dcchuck 6mo agoThis is great! Thank you :heart:
- transitorykris 6mo agoThis is the first time I've encountered this. I want all footnotes to work this way! Otherwise I'm off into a rathole and never return. Love it.
- jdrormdj 6mo agoCould someone from california explain "garage door up" reference? Is it like pretending to be early apple or HP, and starting chip factory on backyard reference? Or some sort of open door policy? I just do not get it. If you own a house, you have $1m capital to deploy towards business. You do not have to invite random people and dogs from street, to steal or pee on your expensive equipment. If you actually have serious workshop like restoring cars or building something, rent a warehouse. HOAs have strict rules about chemicals, noise and vans parked on drive way! And if your goal is to reach people, there is much better way to do that!
- criddell 6mo agoI think "garage door up" means "in the open".
- somehnguy 6mo agoI believe you may be overthinking it a tad. I take it just to mean "work in the open". As an example - at my home unless the weather is poor I always leave my garage door up when working on something, whether vehicles or other projects. This is mainly for sunlight and fresh air but the end result is the same. Any neighbor or passerby can see what I'm doing, and in rare cases may actually be able to help or offer advice.
- jdrormdj 6mo agoI get leaving garage door open, just for ventilation, but I always lock the main gate on driveway. Letting random people to freely roam around workshop seems incredible reckless, dangerous, and like a pending lawsuit! The glassworkhop referenced earlier is working with liquid that is over 1500c! It can amputate a hand in seconds! The same with carpentry, my circular saw does not even have a safety conductivity switch!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fwip 6mo ago
- booleandilemma 6mo agoI don't know if I trust this as much as I did in the past. There's lots of competition out there. Lots of AI companies that want to slurp up data. It's a nice warm and fuzzy thing to say but I don't think it helps you, it just helps competitors get the jump on you.
- simonw 6mo agoFear of AI companies "slurping up data" being used as a rationale for not sharing anything is one of the most underrated harms of the whole current AI mess.
- dimes 6mo agoIt’s not a fear. It’s reality. It’s literally happening on HN right now. Take this game, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698455 Within an hour, someone had cloned the game with addition mechanics that multiple people mentioned they like more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573
- simonw 6mo agoThat's not an AI company "slurping up data", that's someone using AI tools to accelerate their own personal clone of a project.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoI think you're missing the point. The game (no pun intended?) has changed. Working with the garage door up has become a liability.
- simonw 6mo agoDoesn't feel particularly different to me, I've been publishing my side projects as open source code on GitHub for over a decade. The effort required to adapt them has dropped, but I've always exposed them to being adapted.
- mattkevan 6mo agoGenuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today. Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]. Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.
- simonsarris 6mo ago> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it] Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
- cyberge99 6mo agoXtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.
- dvt 6mo agoCurious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems like it was being algorithmically pushed, especially during the DOGE days. But I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall. Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
- antiframe 6mo agoI think it depends on if your values align with the communities or not. For those that align, it seems fine. For those that don't, it's hostile.
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- BoostandEthanol 6mo agoGoes both ways. I had a phase of trying this and found I had to invest as much or more effort figuring out how to document stuff for the eyes of an outside observer as I did on the actual task. Guess maybe the answer in my case is to not make it accessible, but does that defeat the purpose?
- stonogo 6mo agoI don't think it defeats the purpose. Your audience will find you. Once that happens, you will start getting feedback, and then you can decide how to handle that. Closing the door just means your audience can't find you in the first place.
- orev 6mo agoFiguring out how to document stuff for others forces you to think things through at a deeper level yourself, and that’s the main point of the idea being presented here. Forcing yourself to organize your own thoughts is where the personal growth comes from.
- tristor 6mo agoI'm kind of disappointed that this is about social media presence and not the physical world. I am a big proponent of working with your garage door up, quite literally, and I make it a point to do projects in my garage or my driveway, visible to my neighbors. I also make it a point to interact with my neighbors if they're doing a project and offer a hand or company (if they're interested in either). This is part of how I've built community around me in the places I live. Doing things like helping someone replace a valve cover gasket and spark plugs at 11PM so they could get to work in the morning when they were already too deep in fixing their only car; baking bread and running my smoker in the driveway and then offering BBQ sandwiches to my neighbors; setting up my jobsite table saw and miter saw in the driveway when doing home improvement projects, only to find out a neighbor is a tiler and can help me finish out my shower after I do the framing; etc. I have found a lot of value in being open to other people, when I'm actively engaged in something. It's not even about displaying competence or showing off (which is how I look at people doing the same on social media), it's about doing your own thing in a way which is inviting rather than offputting, so if somebody wants to ask questions, give a helping hand, or just feel comfortable doing their own thing in a way that's inviting, you help create that sense of community and ambience around you. This is a stark contrast to many places around, at least the US, where something as simple as working on your car in your driveway might be punished. Community is built, and we're all part of it, and working in the open is one of the best ways to help build community. To that point, though, there /used/ to be a place to do this online in an honest way, which was niche forums. I wrote and posted many of the how-to guides for one of the popular cheap enthusiast car platforms I used to own on the niche webforum for that platform, in part because there wasn't much material out there so I knew I'd actively be helping others to document and photograph my work for sharing online. But now those forums are mostly gone, replaced by Facebook groups, and across the net the signal to noise ratio is completely skewed. Trying to work in the open online is screaming into the void, and if someone does notice it is actively offputting because it comes off as insincere and self-aggrandizing. It is absolutely not the same as literally working with your garage door open.
- nemomarx 6mo agoThis works pretty well for physical projects but I think coding in your garage with the door open would not invite a lot of conversation or connection? Maybe it would be a nice wfh office in the summer, though.
- chromacity 6mo ago[dead]
- alexpotato 6mo agoI forget where I read this quote but have always loved it: "When I was a teenager, I read about all of these Bay Area guys that launched startups from their garage. I thought 'Man, those guys must be really tough!'. Why? Because I'm from Canada and working in garages in the winter is really cold."
- tomhow 6mo agoHere you go! https://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html https://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
- stavros 6mo ago> That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. Imagine living somewhere where you have so much spare space that the only issue is whether the weather is good enough to be comfortable in it.
- amelius 6mo agoWithout HVAC, it can still be tough.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mannanj 6mo agoI have resistance to sharing work in a way that also still protects my interest in monetizing and profiting from the work eventually. How do you all balance this? In a startup bootcamp they asked us to not worry about theft, though I feel its borderline gullible and naive to share some things.
- analog31 6mo agoI'll definitely steal the phrase (with attribution of course). When I first started using Jupyter, I was curious about the idea of turning a notebook into a paper or book by hiding all of the code cells. In fact I learned how to do it, and have now forgotten. More recently, I just share the notebook, code and all. I've learned that people like managers actually like it that way, because it gives them a feeling of involvement, like bringing them into the lab. You can read it, use it, change it, whatever you want. Unfortunately, the climate doesn't like me working with the garage door up. During the winter, it's cold. During the summer, condensation pools on the cold floor.
- emehrkay 6mo agoI really like this website and how the articles stack when you click internal links
- lioeters 6mo agoI think the software is called TiddyWiki. https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyWiki5 https://github.com/TiddlyWiki/TiddlyWiki5
- Animats 6mo agoI used to do that for physical projects in the TechShop days. It helped, a little.
- mettamage 6mo agoI'd love to but I'm afraid, I'll be in breach with my employer. I don't know what I can or can't say.
- myself248 6mo agoThis is part of the power of a makerspace, to me. To show up and work on my own thing, whether or not someone asks about it, whether or not someone offers to help. Those latter things are where I usually focus, but the first is important too. The funny thing is, the space really has a garage door (two, in fact), and when the weather permits, we love to work with them up. Occasionally people wander by and inquire, and get a tour, and some of them have joined as members.
- triwats 6mo agoTHe interface - or the garage itself - is huge here. I want multiple ways to publish. Sometimes I wanna share images, sometimes I just wanna pipe output from a command and add some context. Pretty frustrated of going into apps like X that break my train of thought instantly.
- fragmede 6mo agomakes me want to make a blogging platform that gets your post by catting to binary at the of a pipe. vi new-post.md cat new-post.md | newblogservice cat my-open-garage-door.jpeg | newblogservice etc.
- regenschutz 6mo agoIt definitely depends on the platform, though. On GitHub, absolutely, work with the garage door up. But on some platforms, it's the complete opposite. Many moons ago, I was making mod for a game and had the idea to publish it on Nexus Mods [0] so that I didn't have to bother setting anything up once I actually wanted to publish the initial release of the mod. It was not at all in a working state when I made the public page for it. Imagine my surprise when I wake up the next day and have thousands of views on the page and a dozen comments berating me for publishing a mod that doesn't work... Ever since then, I have had problems with working with the garage door up, even though I know that it's totally acceptable on GitHub. It's habit by now to work on everything with the garage door down, just in case... [0]: https://www.nexusmods.com/ https://www.nexusmods.com/
- qiine 6mo agoYou didn't link your mod? Also I think fundamentally people on nexus mode assume: the mod is there=it work The majority of people on there are not familiar with software dev concepts, they just seek cool new content for their fav game.
- jkestner 6mo agoI get most people don’t want to fight that perception, but it’s an opportunity to educate people on the process, and if enough people do this, it normalizes the idea of people working on things, instead of the idea that products are delivered from the heavenly forges of big tech. It’s something I admire about the best Kickstarter projects, and the framing that the platform has provided (even if it’s marketing facade now). You post regular updates about what you’re doing, you resist the urge to look perfect, you demystify creation. I think that’s kind of important for society to trust how our modern world was made, too. My kids are going to have an advantage in making things from scratch because they simply witness me doing it.
- holybbbb 6mo agoYeah work with the garage door up so better equipped competitors can have an easier time copying your work. Do these navel gazing blog posts come with any life experience?
- mavleop 6mo agoI really dislike this comment as it assumes that everything is a competition and needs to make money. If you just do things for your own enjoyment, then it’s obviously better to do it semi-publicly so that you can connect with other like-minded people or simply give online passers-by something neat to look at. Plus, if you’re motivated by the activity and not the outcome, you don’t have to worry about competitors at all because you have no competitors.
- Geof25 6mo agoIt really depends. If you know your competitor and understand their core business, then opening garage doors can actually screw them up. I am working in an industry where if one competitor would go open source and created decent open application, whole industry will effectively implode because end customers will always choose cheaper solution, which in case of open source would be for free.
- holybbbb 6mo agoThat’s true of quite a few industries though, but it takes insider knowledge to know what to build.
- thelastgallon 6mo agoReminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbPqWI90maA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbPqWI90maA (Seinfeld Men love to work....or to watch other men working)
- pickleballcourt 6mo agoLove the title
- splitbrain 6mo ago> it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. I'd love to do this. But I have learned that my brain does not work this way. The moment I explain my shower thought project to anyone, I immediately lose all interest in actually building it. I don't know why. If I want to succeed building a new thing, I can not talk to anyone before I have actually built the first fully working version of it.
- giwook 6mo agoThis is a common occurrence I believe. There's something called the goal disclosure effect where telling someone about your goals can reduce your motivation to achieve them. There's also a 'dopamine reward prediction', where your brain releases dopamine for signals that you're on the path to success, which includes talking about, planning, or imagining success. As a result I've also learned to not talk too much about anything I want to build before I actually have built something. I feel like this article might be slightly different though in that you're moreso just thinking out loud, more like rubber ducky debugging than talking about some idealistic vision you're striving for.
- ninalanyon 6mo agoI often feel that the interesting part of a project is working out how to do it in sufficient detail to be sure I can do it. But from then on it's just work and I lose interest even if the only person I have explained it to is myself.
- taffydavid 6mo agoJust an aside but the reason people like carpenters work with the garage door up is sawdust and airflow more than inviting the world to watch. I don't know what the code equivalent of this is
- zuluonezero 6mo agoVery much liked the split screen popping from one link to another flow from this website. Nice idea.