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Working in Public: Skeptic to Believer

In this short post I will share with you my brief experience building and working in public and reasons why you should consider it.

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    David Boyne
    Published on • 7 min read
Blog cover

People all around the world are generating content and sharing their experiences online.

Sharing your knowledge and experience online (working in public) can have some huge benefits.

  • Build a following/audience
  • New Opportunities
  • Successful businesses
  • Meeting new people
  • Learning
  • and much more...

I follow a range of people online generating content and see and hear their success stories.

But in the back of my head I start to wonder...

Is working in public all it's cracked out to be?

•••

The biggest hurdle is knowing where to start and getting over Imposter Syndrome.

  • "If I share my ideas in public, people will think I'm a fraud"
  • "Noone will want to listen to what I share"
  • "How can you possibly start?"

These thoughts haunt me everytime I share anything online and maybe they also resonate with you?

Even if I wanted to start on this journey, where do I start?

•••

I decided to give the "working in public" a shot to see what would happen, and decided to create content, spike ideas and share thoughts online.

After a few months of sharing content online some amazing things started to happen.

In this blog post I want to share with you some of the experiences I have gone through and reasons why I believe you should also share and build in public.

Grab a drink, let's go.

•••

Start, Stop, Start

Blog coverPhoto by Tim Foster on Unsplash

Around 2015 I started to share content online. Through blog posts and projects on GitHub. I got into a flow of creativity and the feeling was amazing. Spiking and playing with ideas and sharing with communities online.

Then over time something happened....

I stopped.

For whatever reason, I slowly stopped generating content and sharing ideas.

I focused on working privately (what most of us do as default) and occasionally doing some local talks for people, nothing too much.

Fast forward to the Covid-19 pandemic and I realised I wanted to try and get some of that energy and feeling back in my life (like some kind of drug).

Then thankfully I stumbled across a course that reignited the fire.

Reignite the fire

Blog coverPhoto by R.D Smith on Unsplash

Luckily I came across https://bloggingfordevs.com/ built by Monica Lent.

I decided to sign up for the course and give it ago. (I recommend you check it out).

Monica has developed a great method to deliver the course through weekly emails. The best thing is the course is drip feed over a course of weeks, one email per week keeping things nice and simple.

So after following the course (on and off) I managed to get the energy to create my website and blog again (the feeling of sharing was coming back slowly).

Blogging for devs managed to reignite my passion for sharing and building things in public again 🙏.

Sharing Content

Blog coverPhoto by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

It wasn't long after my blog was live, I started to get the energy back to start to share and build ideas and projects.

Some projects I decided to work on were https://awsicons.dev/ and https://eventbridge-atlas.netlify.app/.

If you want to build or share your work in public, it's important to share your process as you build. People like to see how things are built, not just the finished product.

When building EventBridge Atlas I just started with some screenshots and concepts and shared the process on Twitter. The project seemed to resonate with a few people which validated the need of the tool itself.

Then something amazing started to happen.

By sharing my thoughts and work new opportunities and relationships with people started to emerge.

Let me show you some examples of things that happened next.

•••

Outcomes from sharing content

Getting a shoutout from A Cloud Guru

It was awesome to be recognised for the open source work I have been doing to help the AWS community with https://awsicons.dev/ and https://eventbridge-atlas.netlify.app/.

Introduced to AsyncAPI community

After releasing EventBridge Atlas Fran Méndez got in touch and we had some great conversations about AsyncAPI its origin and what it tries to solve. Since then I have been watching the community grow, meet the team and got exposed to the Spec.

It's great to have the AsyncAPI community support my work and also provide me with feedback and ideas for other projects 🙏.

Shout out from Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is the Chief Evangelist for AWS. I have huge respect for Jeff and it was awesome to see Jeff give EventBridge Atlas a shoutout to his audience 🙏

Going live on AWS Twitch Stream

I have been following Heitor Lessa on Twitter for awhile now and super impressed with the work he is doing for the community. It was super cool when Heitor and Tiago Barbosa reached out on Twitter asking if I was interested in joining their Twitch stream!

They managed to get upgraded to the main AWS Twitch channel and it was great to be on the show.

Meeting the EventBridge Team

Amazon EventBridge is awesome. The features and team behind the service is motivating and inspiring.

I have been following Nick on Twitter for a while now, and continue to be super impressed with his passion for EventBridge, knowledge and ability to share things with the community. EventBridge Atlas gave me the opportunity to meet Nick and discuss some EventBridge Atlas work and also EventBridge in general. Awesome!

Maybe one day we could see some EventBridge Atlas features being embedded within EventBridge itself 😲 ⭐️

•••

So, why am I sharing all of this?

Sharing ideas and content online, sparks conversations, creates new opportunities and connections between people.

If you are considering writing a blog post, sharing code or ideas. I highly recommend you try it.

It's amazing what can happen from just a thought or an idea as I experienced with EventBridge Atlas.

You don't have to be the best author or engineer to share your ideas.

Share what you know, remember there is always the need for content online.

My final thoughts:

By sharing what we do we encourage others to share what they do.

We create a movement of learning and growth between each other online which creates innovation and new ways to solve problems.

It all starts with sharing.

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  • avatar
    David Boyne
    Engineer | Architect | Technical Lead | Enjoy learning things and sharing as I go.