Work with the garage door up (2024)
notes.andymatuschak.org
notes.andymatuschak.org
"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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I find it a really intuitive way to browse notes and to get a feeling for the relationships between your collected information.
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.
Take this game, for example: 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
The effort required to adapt them has dropped, but I've always exposed them to being adapted.
> The effort required to adapt them has dropped
AI is an entirely different situation because the effort required to copy has dropped by multiple orders of magnitude. You used to be able to build in the open without worrying about copycats because the vast majority of people didn’t want to spend the effort. Now (with AI), even someone with the slightest, most fleeting whim can copy your work.
It’s great that you’re open to being adapted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re not open to having your ideas outright taken, then it’s not safe to build in the open any longer.
The slurping can be both real and the induced reluctance to share a harm.
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.
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.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".
I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.
What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
I do agree that engagement farming is—and has been—a problem, but as someone that worked in social media (mostly on the data side, fwiw), it's been a problem for like a decade+ now, long predating "modern" Twitter. And it's a consistent problem on all platforms (I mostly use Instagram, and it's annoying on there as well).
The difference between Twitter now and Twitter a decade ago isn't in the quantity of vapid interactions; it's the proportion of that to anything else. The slide started a long, long time ago and at some point effectively no one was trying to stop it anymore. I'm sure there are still corners where useful information gets passed on in a timely manner, but like the citizens of so many venues before it those corners have been diminished and isolated to an extent that it no longer feels worthwhile for those not already entrenched in them to bother seeking them out
And my point was that, from what I can tell, that proportion of trash::value has been increasing on all social media in (more or less) lockstep. If anything, I'd say Facebook has seen the most precipitous drop in quality, not Twitter. So much so that I don't even log in anymore, and I was veritably addicted during college.
I even get sucked into contributing at times, which is why that descent into trash _works_ so well. I hate it, and I visit HN less and less as a result.
So the best ever except for one of the biggest crap parts that didn't exist at all just a few years ago?
Though actually I think it's just more people figuring out how the interests of social media companies aren't the same as their own interests, and Musk's very-visible fiddling with things drove home the "people are trying to to addict you and influence you" point MUCH more quickly than anything ever did in the past to a wide chunk of the population. Not new in essence, but now highlighted with a giant neon sign pointing at it.
That and the real time translation aspect leading to true global conversations right now is absolutely awesome.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.
Example, Pete's Garage.
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
The project was basically a wordle-like game, but for chess puzzles. It was focused less on being an actual chess puzzle game (i.e., tricky chess game positions that lead to a decisive turnaround) and more on actually training to improve your blunder game (i.e., each puzzle was more of a "pick a move that isn't a blunder given a scenario from a real lichess game").
He made a post on r/chess, it gathered a small number upvotes, there were a few comments left along the lines of "omg this is so awesome, this is helping my anti-blunder skills a lot, had no idea I wanted this until I saw it." And no, I didn't leave a comment, but I upvoted the post. It didn't feel right to brigade a post with my positive comments on it as a friend, especially given how anal reddit mods can get about this in some cases.
Next thing I see, mods just removed his post with a "no promotion allowed" reasoning. The website had no ads, no paid components, not even a name/profile of my friend attached to it (so no self-promotion angle either; he is gainfully employed and isn't looking for a job). He did it purely for the love of the game, some subreddit users clearly found it helpful, and yet the mods just deleted it.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I also blog, but POSSE is not as good as it could be.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is one of those (increasingly rare) internet conversations that might lead to legitimately better outcomes in my life.
In a corporate setting it's a bit different, since you need to create non-critical sharing spaces where it's okay to share that sort of progress.
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.
Maybe it would be a nice wfh office in the summer, though.
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.
vi new-post.md
cat new-post.md | newblogservice
cat my-open-garage-door.jpeg | newblogservice
Do these navel gazing blog posts come with any life experience?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
There is not much danger that a random person will come into your garage and put their hand under your circular saw while you are working it.
Nonsense, you might want to check both the liquid and the temp claims with an actual glass blower.
That quibble aside, glass is a joy in the sense that it doesn't spit and doesn't stick to the skin unlike molten metal.
Further, I know many glassblowers who have worked small hot shops for decades with members of the public mere feet away, several with no barriers to stop the public from reaching out to grab hot glass ... something that still hasn't happened to any that I've heard of / reported on group, etc.
I'd never buy a home in a HOA, because I don't need this guy telling me how I can use my garage. City ordinances are already good enough, when it comes to sane noise and parking rules.