publish your work

content/post/2024/01/publish-your-work.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: Publish Your Work
+date: 2024-01-31T10:22:00+01:00
+categories:
+  - braindump
+---
+
+As an electrical and mechanical engineer, my late father-in-law was an expert in crafting home-grown black boxes that meticulously---and sometimes also miraculously---executed certain tasks in and around the house, such as automatically opening and closing the curtains based on the position of the sun (that included LEGO Technic radar work), routing audio and video from the doorbell to the TV or smartphone when someone pressed the button, or mediating the central heating based on too many factors. He also loved building things that weren't really needed, just for fun: how about a full-size sixties jukebox emulated with a couple of Arduino boards, where each mechanical piece was hand-cut? 
+
+When I asked him why he doesn't take pictures of each project to document and publish them online, to inspire others, he was never interested. Most of these projects aren't well-documented privately either, leaving us now with unsolvable puzzles when things break. But his ideas, as with all ideas, were gradually formed by studying ideas and projects of others, so why not come full circle to again share what you've made? I never really got an answer as to why not. 
+
+When I talk to friends about blogging, or more generally "putting stuff out there", the vast majority of them don't care, and that comes across as very strange to me, since I do. Not everyone has the urge [to write in public](/post/2023/11/on-writing-for-yourself-in-public/). Yet publishing your work comes with so many advantages that I don't even know where to begin to list them. I think many people underestimate the value of sharing what you've made. 
+
+Austin Kleon wrote a whole book about this [called Show Your Work!](https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/), which, as Austin puts it, _is a good starting point for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion_. Perhaps I should have given a copy to my father-in-law, although I doubt that would have changed anything. He was content tinkering in his cellar without letting the world know what he made. Yet if he did, more people would have made something based on his work. And that feeling of contributing is amazing. 
+
+It doesn't take a genius or a huge project to make a bit of an impact. Just influencing your own "tribe", as Seth Godin likes to call it, is more than enough to get a positive feedback loop going. As a silly example, I fooled around with hacking a [Phomemo M02 thermal printer](/post/2023/02/phomemo-thermal-printing-on-macos/) a year ago, and I just found out that there's a Node CLI module on GitHub that thanks my article for pointing them in the right direction. Conventional contributions to existing open-source projects is of course the obvious other example, but it's not even needed to go that far. I sometimes just write about things I tried---and often failed---to do, and it always puts a smile on my face when I notice someone picked that up.
+
+I don't create or publish in the hopes of influencing others. I create things because I have an urge to create. But it sure is great to help others along the way, however small my contribution might be. I don't care about being found online and I am certainly not actively pushing my stuff down others' throats (Kleon's rule #7: _Don't turn into human spam_). I love reading about the creation process of others. I love sharing my creation process. It's almost second nature: it feels like a wasted opportunity to do something good in this world if I didn't. 
+
+If you made something, great! Why don't you tell us about it? It's simple, you just need to hire a VPS, configure `iptables`, download and customize a Hugo theme, write front matter and markdown, have a CI pipeline setup, and install Nginx. Ah, dang it!

content/tags/_index.md

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 ## By Year
 
 - [2024](/post/2024) ... when I don't yet know what the year will bring
-- [2023](/post/2023) ... when I intend to publish my PhD and be finally done with it
+- [2023](/post/2023) ... when I the PhD was defended and our daughter was born
 - [2022](/post/2022) ... when working from home was still a thing
 - [2021](/post/2021) ... when I got back into both retro (80486) and modern (M1) hardware
 - [2020](/post/2020) ... when I paid attention to webdesign and wrote a book about baking