Do Things, Tell People. | Hacker News Reader

Do Things, Tell People.

carl.flax.ie

274 pointsredfloatplane45 comments

Author here. This is why I think every programmer should have at least these two things: a twitter account, and a github account. A github account to publish what you do, and a twitter account to tell people. You can do this sort of thing from anywhere with an internet connection, and it's free and easy. (I also think every programmer should have business cards. Can't be contacted if nobody has your email address).

I would question the need for a twitter account. I see programmers with twitter accounts, and it seems like they invest so much more effort to maintain it (retweets, circle-jerking, etc) than they get out of it. A github account should do just fine...if people like you, they follow you and/or your projects.

Also, if you're not very good (you're still kinda green) why advertise it?

Once something is out there, you can never take it back.

Well, I think putting that sort of thing out there is pretty admirable, too (as long as you know that it's not the best thing on the planet). Getting helpful and constructive criticism is one of the best things that can happen to programmers - especially ones without formal training. And besides, you can always delete github repositories.

I guess it depends on what your goal is. If it's to pretend to be good or if it's to become good.

Having public work means you can get direct feedback on the work you are doing and this is an excellent way of learning :)

I don't think you can really grow or develop your skills in a vacuum. We should encourage people to put their work out in the open. And discourage the negative ego talk that's so prevalent in our communities.

Very true! We can all learn from each other regardless of our level of experience. No one person knows everything. There's nothing wrong with making a mistake and learning from that and nothing wrong with others knowing that you have the balls to make a public mistake. No one will know your name otherwise.

Edit: Your comment reminds me of over-hearing a man make fun of another man who had asked a question in a forum. The irony of this was that he was sitting in the corner of a dark, smoky bar at night while making fun of another man who had the balls to ask a question in a public forum during the light of day. No one knows the guy who was making fun because he himself was too afraid to ask questions and always thought that someone like himself would criticize him as he criticized others. Technology could use less negative egos!

I get where you are coming from. I have even received high praise for the quality of my code, but I still remain quite embarrassed when publishing it. It is difficult to not judge yourself critically, and feel that everyone is going to do the same.

However, I never find myself judging others the same way. I have stumbled upon some pretty great stuff by people who, in reality, are not anywhere near the top of their field, but it doesn't matter, it remains great regardless.

I think the worst thing that can happen is that nobody finds what you have published. Marketing is difficult, even for hobby work.

http://xkcd.com/137/

That's true enough. I think some form of community account is necessary, though (even Hacker News or Reddit). I think github isn't the most discoverable type of social network - I don't really go looking for interesting bits of code on github, but I do see links to them on HN and twitter and all the rest of it.

Twitter is huge with the brogrammers.

a gihub account and a blog.

I'd add StackOverflow to that list!

In general, I think you mean a way to publish and a way to communicate. I closed my github and twitter accounts and re-took control by publishing source code on my website. I'll occasionally communicate things I've done that I think may interest others here or on other similar sites. I try not to over-do that though. Too many self-centered posts turn a lot of people off I think.

That's true, and it's exactly what I mean. I wrote this while thinking about some of my fellow students - many don't have their own website, for example, but they deserve to have their work seen. I named twitter because it's an extremely simple service and a very large number of tech people use it, and I named github because it's one of the easiest and most popular ways to share source code.

Certainly, though, I just mean publish and advertise. The methods and services through which you do that don't matter all that much.

I prefer more suitable announcement platforms over twitter, such as

- freecode.com (formerly freshmeat.net)

- for games: happypenguin.org

- posts to related usergroup mailing lists

- posts to topic related mailing lists and newsgroups

- personal emails to friends who showed some interest

- ...

I want to tell you about a network that's been growing like crazy. Anybody can get cheap accounts on it and once you do, you can associate it with anything you want.

It's super customizable; you can use it to let people find out all about you and your skills. It works great from desktops, tablets and phones.

It's called 'DNS'.

It's easy to forget today, but this was how academia began 350 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society

What was there before the Royal Society? There were still universities, wasn't that 'Academia'? Or is there a specific meaning to the word 'academia' I don't know?

There was teaching, yes, but there wasn't modern, peer-reviewed research. Even Newton spent half his lifetime as an alchemist. It just wasn't that clear that science was the more fruitful endeavor.

I'm not claiming the Royal Society 'invented' peer-reviewed science. It wasn't a dramatic moment of epiphany, just a gradually growing insight that spread through society. And the Royal Society was at its forefront.

"... What was there before the Royal Society? ..."

To get an idea of the formation of empirical science in Europe read Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_%28novel%29 & a quick synopsis here ~ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/history.html

It goes much farther back than that...

Akademeia was literally the name of the grove where Plato started his Akademeia in 350 BC. Plato took these ideas of an ascetic brotherhood of ideas/mathematics from Pythagoras. No one knows exactly how Pythagoras came up with his ideas, but he did travel widely in his youth, at least as far as Egypt, seeking knowledge.

Plato's Akademeia was for teaching. The modern research-oriented connotation of the word only dates from 1880 or so.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=academia

Of course, I wasn't talking about the word, but the idea. That is a little bit older, but it's definitely a post-renaissance creation.

(I also responded at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615474)

"Do Things, Tell People" == "Show HN: .*"

I'm sure most of the folks here enjoy the" Show HN:" posts the most - just like github has become the standard for putting your code out there, wish there was a dotcloud/heroku/appengine like standard that would provide a "Cool projects" feed to discover and get inspiration from. Ideally an integration of = "github + dotcloud + Show HN: feed" is what I long for - "Do things, Tell people" and get inspired from others in the network!

Not sure if this fits the bill but I'm building http://swym.me for a similar purpose.

I'm interested to see your Swym project in relation to a side-project of mine called Labradoc.

Where Swym seems to be focused on the "short form", Labradoc is more "long form".

Here's an example of my current projects & notes: http://www.labradoc.com/i/follower

My main interest is ongoing project development logs but I have had people mention they would be interested in a way to "follow" developers which Swym seems to cover in an interesting way.

I'd argue that the people on HN are the ones you are likely to get the least benefit from. Show your work to people who can actually use it. Not likely to be HN members unless you're making development/server tools.

From my experience (non-technical), it's more about who you know rather than what you do. But, people don't know you unless you do something. It's a vicious circle.

That's not really a vicious circle. People not knowing you shouldn't prevent you from trying to do something.

Do something cool and show it to an online community related to whatever you did, or even Hacker News or Reddit if it has general appeal. If it isn't cool enough to impress them, you'll generally at least get some feedback with which you can make your next attempt better.

If you keep at it and care enough to improve, people will start to know you.

If you are passive, people dont know you unless you do something. If you are active in seeking out interesting people, then you can be somebody who "knows people."

Maybe that's true for non-technical people (though I have strong reservations). But for coders and other techy types there's a rock solid metric of how good you are, which is to look at what you've built. Who knew Mark Zuckerberg before facebook? Who knew Patrick Collison before Auctomatic/Stripe?

Reminds me of Derek Powazek's strategy: "Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again." http://powazek.com/posts/2090

Great to frame that more in the context of "personal brands" vs "not SEO".

I think what you are trying to say invariably translates to people learning to enjoy the process and journey rather than the destination.

You have to do things because you really like doing them and hence you somewhat abstract yourself away from the actual results.

Didn't you guys already visit Game Closure? I think I remember seeing you at AOL over the summer. Congrats to both of you on securing great positions - the way you've presented yourselves definitely makes you easy to hire.

You remember correctly! If you don't mind me asking, who were you with? I (their 15 year old intern) was there from August-November and got to know the place pretty well :)

This is what I don't like about the startup community. I love making things but hate talking about them.

Of course I want my startup to get publicity, I just don't want my name attached to it. Solution?

Attach your name.

I think either find a cofounder who can handle the social/promotion side for you or give up the idea of running your own startup and instead get in early as a dev for someone else's.

I have just quit my job to work full time on an idea I have (still very early stages atm so nothing public right now) but I'm the same as you i.e. self promotion doesn't come easily or naturally (frankly I hate it!).

But... I've accepted that if I want this to go anywhere I'm going to have to work on the self promotion side and somehow learn to be comfortable with it. In the last month I've created a twitter account (still learning the ropes on that) and a github account and I'm also thinking about how I could run a small blog (but I'm only going to do this if I think I've got enough worthwhile things to say - there's nothing worse than a neglected blog with boring content!).

I find all this social stuff a bit scary (and a potentially large time sink) but there's no way around it if you want to get your idea out there, make connections and get noticed.

One plus, as a single founder working in isolation at the moment, is that developing the social side a bit will help keep me honest and motivated because working in a vacuum isn't easy (or healthy).

Something else I forgot which I'm going to try: use something like meetup.com to find a few startup groups in your vicinity and go to one or two. I think it will help break the taboo a bit and make it easier in the future to talk to strangers about your idea (face to face or online).

in summary, toot your own horn

Not quite. To continue this analogy:

In summary, write songs worth tooting and then make sure to actually toot your horn.

Respectfully, the summary should be "Do things, Tell people".

yes. toot your own horn, because nobody else will.

This is massively inspiring to me. This article is now hanging on my cubicle wall. Thank you, Carl.

I'm really glad that you thought it so good! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com