4 ms·

samspot is dead on here, at least from my perspective. I am very private and have suffered from social anxiety for years. I don't use Facebook because I am over

samspot is dead on here, at least from my perspective. I am very private and have suffered from social anxiety for years. I don't use Facebook because I am overly sensitive to the reactions of others (no likes? everyone hates me and thinks I'm stupid). I spend far too much time thinking about what others think of me, so my natural inclination is to completely remove myself from public view at all opportunities. I don't use GitHub for this reason. I'd like to contribute and become part of a community, but I'm so terrified of being judged that I never step forward. So I completely understand the author's attempts to go public. It isn't about being the next DHH, it's about overcoming the fear of rejection. I have been considering "going public" for years for this very reason.

bennyg 12y ago
Just do it. Seriously. What's the worst that could happen about pushing some open source code on GitHub? You don't have to start by contributing to openssl or something of similar magnitude. Just push some stuff to your personal one. Trust me, I graduated college with an art degree and some of my earliest GitHub stuff shows this. But I keep pushing, literally. One of my babies has 1300+ stars and that's awesome to me. I don't think of it like validation, but more like "holy shit a lot of people like this." Some of my libraries are sitting at 0 stars, and that's ok.
samspot 12y ago
Freaked me out a bit saying I was dead, I appear to be alive again, at least from checking with some random devices. I'm not sure if this describes you, but I can be pretty thin skinned on the internet, which often discourages me from posting. I write things and delete them more often than I hit submit. One nice thing about going public is it's unlikely anyone will notice you for a while. Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).
- patio11 12y ago
  Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC). If only getting visitors were as easy as being related to them! No, seriously speaking, my blog had perhaps 200~300 visitors for the average article from 2006 through, hmm, late 2009 or so? (What changed? A combination of discovering HN, going full time, changing my writing style to exclusively focus on the 4k to 8k word essay that I feel is generally my best work, and a minor refocusing on topics.)

bennyg 12y ago

Just do it. Seriously. What's the worst that could happen about pushing some open source code on GitHub? You don't have to start by contributing to openssl or something of similar magnitude. Just push some stuff to your personal one. Trust me, I graduated college with an art degree and some of my earliest GitHub stuff shows this. But I keep pushing, literally. One of my babies has 1300+ stars and that's awesome to me. I don't think of it like validation, but more like "holy shit a lot of people like this." Some of my libraries are sitting at 0 stars, and that's ok.

samspot 12y ago

Freaked me out a bit saying I was dead, I appear to be alive again, at least from checking with some random devices. I'm not sure if this describes you, but I can be pretty thin skinned on the internet, which often discourages me from posting. I write things and delete them more often than I hit submit. One nice thing about going public is it's unlikely anyone will notice you for a while. Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).

patio11 12y ago
Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC). If only getting visitors were as easy as being related to them! No, seriously speaking, my blog had perhaps 200~300 visitors for the average article from 2006 through, hmm, late 2009 or so? (What changed? A combination of discovering HN, going full time, changing my writing style to exclusively focus on the 4k to 8k word essay that I feel is generally my best work, and a minor refocusing on topics.)