I have dozens of repos, and very few stars.

I really couldn't care less. I'm writing software for my own use. I use it all the time. It allows me to do things like write entire apps in minutes.

The reason that I "put it out there," is that it forces me to cross my t's, and dot my i's. If I am publishing a supported package, then I do a seriously good job on things like documentation and testing. When all my dependencies are top-shelf, there's a damn good chance the aggregate is also gonna be good.

But I'm actually fairly happy that no one uses it. I'm no longer looking for work, so its value as portfolio material is reduced.

And I already know that it's good. I don't need anyone else to act as a judge. There's stuff I can do better (My stuff has a noticeable improvement, over time), but it's a recipe for misery, expecting fair judgment from other techs. They'll do things like smear your work, because you don't use their favorite buzzword du jour.

The proof is in the using. I eat my own dog food, and often expose issues in my own work. If others use my stuff, I appreciate bug reports, and also use things like the questions they ask to refine my supporting docs.

Good luck!

> it forces me to cross my t's, and dot my i's

In open source you are supposed to cross the i's and dot the t's. /s

Good technical writing structure, alongside grammar and spelling is also is a hallmark of professionalism, a good skill to hone for career progression.

I like the /s…

I had started by hoping (almost assuming) people would be amazed at how useful my library was. But mostly they didn't notice it, or (and this was harder to accept): didn't even recognize or understand the issues it was addressing in the first place.

5 years later, the issues are generally much better understood in android world, but still. I know some teams are using it, but it's probably not that many.

So publishing it has just become a hobby, it's something I can be proud of, it works nicely, I often use it (or the knowledge gained while writing it) to speed up whatever I'm doing and make my life easier. I also publish articles about said issues, and they seem to be helpful to the people that read them, and I enjoy explaining things I understand.

I'm not on the engineering manager track, and I hope to be programming until I retire, so I'll probably just keep supporting it.

If I had any advice for the OP I'd say set your expectations at: personal pride in doing a good job

(I'm definitely not the best person to dispense any kind of marketing advice anyway)

In fact, it has been my experience, that high Quality actually makes the repo "radioactive."

Go figure.

Like you have your own framework? Or templates? I'm always curious to see other people's workflows if you have a link

I have a whole bunch of published SPM modules for things like GUI widgets, extensions, and infrastructure, that give me a really good start.

Look at the links in my answer, below (or above)[0], to see many of them.

Here are a few: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31057484

Hmm, I'm seeing only four here:

https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY?tab=repositories

Am I missing something?

I say it on my profile (https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away).

Most of my repos are in the various orgs that I manage.

Back when StackOverflow still had stories, I linked to them all (I have over 40, spread around a bit). I’m no longer interested in finding work, so writing up a “story” page is not a priority for me. I’ll get around to it, sooner or later. The GH profile markdown has links to most of the stuff out there, but not all directly.

Here’s a couple more links for you, but they are not all of them:

https://github.com/LittleGreenViper

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware

…and a few gists, for extra credit…

https://gist.github.com/ChrisMarshallNY

And I don’t have forks. I’m the original author of all of them.

This is the user docs page for the app I just released to the app store, tonight: https://littlegreenviper.com/portfolio/nacc/

I wrote that app in an afternoon, but have spent a couple of weeks, on and off, polishing it up.

Plenty of people will be nice and constructive, but I often feel for the people posting their work on here given how harsh the community can be.

Edit - to op: post it because you find it interesting to work with and ignore all the know-it-alls. Maybe people will care, maybe not, but whatever. Do it because you like it.

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word. 2. Don't Take Anything Personally. (Most people are wrong) 3. Don't Make Assumptions. 4. Always Do Your Best.

Everyone can say that after the fact. Everyone DOES say that after the fact. It's just barely possible to forget that you know the result and put yourself in the mind of people who don't. I always ask "what things are YOU doing now that will look ridiculous in 40 years?"

In my book I used the novel approach to the Xerox Star, mainly so that the characters would not know how it turns out. I had to be judicious in how I treated Unix, C, and AI, since we really did talk about them back then, but no winking at the reader is allowed.

Rsync is easy for those who used it. That number (people who knew rsync) declined but less so here. Hn users were not natural customers but even that changed

Then again, maybe HN being especially critical helps keep the quality of submissions high.

On the other hand, I don’t think the condescension or arrogance that’s fairly common on this site improves it at all, no.

Many will improve, with guidance.

Those that don’t will blunder along, wondering why they can’t make it in the world.

They are not pointless, those posts tell, that a clear explanation is missing.

Most people simply do not read a lot and in detail. If they don't get it after some seconds looking at things, they will walk away. And look at the next thing.

Summarizing a big novel project in simple words surely is hard, but very important.

This ‘criticize people to death’ shit should embarrass everyone here. We can be better.

> If you're not a little bit embarrassed by what you're showing, you waited too long

The idea was to get rid of the "do everything in a big launch"-projects, and instead convert them to a mindset where we iteratively work on the solution and see what people want.

I've been using that line personally for a long time, and think it works fine. Chances are you will get no traction at all in the beginning, so it's better to see if it's something people want to use before you polish it too much. Building stuff openly also often attracts some following over time, compared to a one-off launch.

(and me translating it from our language back to English probably jumbled it a bit up)

Silence. The world ignores you and your work. It never makes frontpage or gets starred by more than a handful of people. This is not a problem my itself. Unless your work is transient, it’ll help you compound. You’ll build on it, and if something you make later is useful people will still find the early work by association.

Soul crushing criticism. Many people will point out that the work is crap, should not exist, or that you are crap, or that you should not exist. You can ignore the last two, and read and take lessons from the first two. Don’t fall into the trap of “oh the world does not understand my genius!” feelings, sometimes the crowd does know more than you, and sometimes you have an intersection of specialised knowledge and you know more than the crowd. Develop the wisdom to know the difference and the confidence to accept either conclusion.

Being hailed as a genius in your own time. Some people will think you or your work are the best thing since sliced bread. If they think that about your work, thank them, enjoy the compliment, and then forget about it as quickly as possible. Everything you do till you die is a first draft, you and/others will build on it and remix it. If you rest on your laurels or let praise define you, you’ll get stuck. And receiving a different response for later work will be so much more difficult to handle.

All of this easier to handle if you create all of your work for your own satisfaction as an end itself. Criticism and appreciation are simply signals from the outside world, like songs on the radio, you can do with them what you will. But it will all fade to silence. When you yourself finally fade to the void, only the question of whether you stayed true to your potential will matter. But that answer will also pass from this world.

Start publishing stuff, try to share it around, keep expectations super low, and try to enjoy the journey :) One concrete book rec is Amy Hoy’s Just Fucking Ship. I feel like it might resonate.

And those who notice mostly won't care.

Because the world is big and full of lots of things and because people have habits and those mostly fill their days.

On the positive side, nobody dies from bad landing page text, etc.

What sets creators apart is that they create and create and create and when nothing sticks they create some more and when something sticks they create some more.

The reward for work is more work.

Good luck.

I finally bit the bullet and started writing a blog [1] following my experiences in tech, and some tips I picked up along the way.

I was so worried I’d get cancelled or have to deal with trolls or otherwise just have a wave of “constructive” criticism drowning me once I launched.

As it turned out, I got maybe a few hundred views, a few likes, and basically nothing else.

Don’t sweat it, it turns out it’s actually really hard for something you make to go viral.

Just create for the sake of following your passions, and relax knowing that you’ll probably be just fine. :-)

[1] https://medium.com/@TestingInProd

^ My blog for anyone who’s interested

Simple. Don't make your project public for others but for yourself.

Sure, ask for feedbacks, and be nice to those who offer it. But don't obsess about it. If somebody is justly critical of your work, thank them for the time they took to tell you about it. And honestly tell them you weren't aware of it and will learn and fix it when you get the time (if you are interested in doing so). If somebody asks for a feature, consider whether you really want to create that feature and have the time to do it. If not, don't be afraid to say no.

If you don't get any feedbacks, don't be disheartened. You will get feedbacks only when your product finds an audience and becomes popular. And you have to promote your product for it. But the quality of your product has nothing to do with this second aspect - popularity. TextPattern has / had better code quality than WordPress, but WordPress became more popular. Python has always been better than PHP, but PHP was wildly more popular than it in the beginning. Which brings us to the second part:

> What sets the successful "creators" apart from the rest?

1. They complete their project without letting perfectionism get in their way. 2. They are good at promoting their product. 3. They are good at identifying the need of their users and addressing it. 4. They are good in collaborating with others. 5. They are not afraid to step back and stop working on a project when it stops being fun for them.

I’ve put dozens of things out there over the decades and there is only one metric that you need to care about…

Is anyone using it regularly? (Or are people consuming it - if it’s words)

Anything else and you’re just hyperventilating while wasting time.

One thing I've learned over the past decade is that, when it comes to promoting my own project, I lack the knowledge and creativity to do the work well. The obvious solution for my case is to find someone who IS good at marketing and evangelising work and, somehow, convince them to work with me to raise the profile of the project. But even that seems like too much hard work - especially when I could be doing more fun stuff, like working on my project's code base, building demos for it, etc.

Still, teaming up with others who have marketing skills you may lack could be the right answer for your situation.

The other input into this calculation - that cannot be planned or measured - is pure, blind luck. For instance, successful HN/Reddit post which generates a lot of comment and feedback because the first commenter raised interesting questions about the project or the problem space it sets out to fix. Or a tweet linking to a demo of the project which gets retweeted by a major influencer (with an "interesting" comment). Anything that gets people talking about the project and/or the problem space it lives in.

Best of luck with your endeavours. Please, please, please don't forget to have some fun during the adventure to come!

Basically, popularity and merit are not related. For your project to become popular, you need a consistent marketing campaign, luck, and the most important thing -- don't expect anyone to do anything different from what they already planned on doing.

Oftentimes, if something is actually kind of stupid or trite or in some way is a regression, that has a much better chance of becoming popular.

But your question is relevant to me because I have not been able to sleep because I was going over ideas in my head for a new lightweight type of web protocol. Which I plan to write up. But because it A) seems really awesome and well thought out to me, and B) requires people to start doing something differently, I expect to be met with indifference (totally ignored) or hostility. But it's such an awesome idea and I wasted all day thinking about it, I am going to put it in my GitHub and post it somewhere anyway. Although posting is often pointless because things often end up with 0-5 votes.

Good feedback: "Why would I pay for your product? I wrote a bash script that does everything you do already. Do you have [feature x]? I'd pay [$y] for that."

Bad feedback: "This is so cool! I could see myself using this if I needed to."

My first solo project, "procedural audio" took 5 years research, 3 years writing a book and 10 years to convince the digital entertainments industry it was something worth considering. Many times along that road I just wanted to give up.

> without getting "sympathy" feedback?

  "I listened for an echo and I heard only praise" -- Nietzsche

good luck

"If you wish to learn and appreciate something worth while, then love to be unknown and considered as nothing. Truly to know and despise self is the best and most perfect counsel. To think of oneself as nothing, and always to think well and highly of others is the best and most perfect wisdom."

-- Thomas `a Kempis

In the world of independent comics, my experience is that it is all of these. Regularly put out decent stuff that you enjoy doing and the followers will slowly climb. Doing fan-art of popular stuff you like can give you boosts, but can also be a trap.

Being there at the right time helps, but you're not gonna be there at the right time with exactly what the moment demands without being there at the wrong time with a lot of okay work beforehand. Luck is the same - the more opportunities you have for long shots, the more likely it is for one of them to finally hit.

Good feedback comes from a mix of your peers and your fans. Share WIPs with both. Good feedback can also come from pros - in the world of comics for instance, you can go to a convention and get in line for a portfolio review, both at "major" publishers[1] and the occasional grizzled pro who just likes to give back to the community by doing this for anyone interested.

Networking comes largely from people who entered the same field at the same time as you and became some kind of friend. The ones you're always delighted to hook up with for a drink/hangout/bitch session with when you're at the same con are the ones who will be most likely to pass on any powerful connections they manage to make[2]. You should be happy to return the favor of course!

1: DC and Marvel and the like, who are actually pretty small fish when you compare their output to the massive amount of books moved in kid's-comics channels - I think my friend Dana recently said she sold more Phoebe and her Unicorn over the past year than Marvel sold across their entire line of comics 2: for instance, you can bet I'm gonna be asking Dana to have a look over the YA SF graphic novel I've been working on when it's done and see if there's anyone at her publisher she'd be willing to pass it on to!

If your personal work isn't something that anyone is interested in, if it isn't something they want or can at least envisage someone wanting, then they're unlikely to spend time looking at it and offering genuine feedback.

If all you're doing is scratching your own itch, and nobody else has that itch, then don't expect any feedback at all, even the sympathy variety.

Impose on a few friends first to read and comment on drafts. They can help identify the rough edges that will discourage other readers with less commitment.

Thank you :)

Don't worry about books or articles. It doesn't matter. Get it out there and use it and get others using it. The rest will take care of itself.

Just do it.

No matter what you do, no matter how relevant or perfect you think it is, someone will find fault. It’s up to you to interpret criticism as constructive or not. You can’t expect other people to know what may offend you or cause you to doubt yourself.

All criticism, and all praise, you get may have value. If someone’s comments make you think about your work then the comments have value. Everything else you can ignore. If you feel defensive or hurt, or flattered, your focus has moved from your work to your ego.

Nabokov, a writer who didn’t give a toss about his critics, wrote something worth keeping in mind:

I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

You asked for books that might help. I’m not sure what your project involves, but I can suggest a few that I have enjoyed.

How to Write a Thesis and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco.

Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov.

1. Learn to make judgment calls in the face of uncertainty.

2. Don't mistake attention for success.

People are prone to liking something for reasons that benefit them. Their reasons for being interested may be actively hostile to your goals and welfare. So don't let crowd reaction be overly important to you.

It's information. But it's also incomplete information and you need to think about things like "Is this really serving my goals and interests?"

The more work you put into something, especially if it was very difficult and you were uniquely qualified, the less likely it is that anyone cares. It just becomes more niche.

Most of the times when I put effort into something, nobody cares. That's okay, it just puts an upper bound on how much effort I do before it's not worth the chance of reward. Other times I slap together a page in 2 minutes and thousands of actual people click through, more people than I could ever really get to know.

Good stuff does get higher quality attention than low effort stuff, but that doesn't mean good stuff necessarily resonates with more people. Being prepared for little traction, especially if you put a lot of work into something, is unfortunately the best expectation to have, until you get a feeling for how likely something is to succeed and you also get some intuition for what works (though, even then, it fails most of the time). The trick is to keep putting things out there anyway and not give up.

I am struggeling with that, too, since years.

I have given up on the "perfect" long ago and am happy with "good enough". But still, there is no way to update a first impression.

If the first impression is bad, they might walk away and never come back. Even if the reason was some stupid technical glitch, that could have been easily fixed. So I would argue in some cases it is indeed better to wait some more time and fix the showstoppers.

Which is why I probably also won't publish today, even though I figured, easter might be a good time strategically.

But I will show it some more people in person today and judge by their reaction what of the issues are really critical.

That's the most effective approach. But there's a frame of mind that goes with it. And that mental frame isn't in it for the upvotes or likes, but quality. You can't control reception or even commercial success of your work. But you can control the quality of what you create.

This is hard, though, because it's easy to use quality as an excuse to never publish anything. So a key element of success is knowing what's "good enough." And there's no way to figure that out without publishing something because it's the first step in getting responses to what you've created.

> What sets the successful "creators" apart from the rest?

The successful creators have defined success in a way that they are capable of achieving. How would you define it?

1. Working on yourself and actively trying to figure out why you're doing this. Inevitable, you'll land a viral hit and it'll feel great. But once it's gone, you'll be left with the same old feeling. So to sustain, I think it's necessary to understand why you're creating.

2. It's practicing in the arena. As a perfectionist myself, I love to be prepared and I hate being assessed by others. But the more you hit publish, the more you're learning and growing. You'll understand what content you can pull off, what people like and what you prefer.

References

- 1: https://plausible.io/timdaub.github.io?period=all

Anyway, this might help you out: https://www.benkuhn.net/outliers/

I think if you're looking for success, you just have to do a large body of work.

Ira Glass says the same thing in different words. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ira+glass+the+c...

I always say, behind every masterpiece are a thousand sketches.

Friends, but not in general. Friends can be a source of feedback aside from just publishing it. Full disclosure: I'm on team just-publish-it.

>how does one know if the content's any good?

Just publish it!

>What's been your experience?

Comfortable obscurity so far.

>Do you know of any good resources

The War of Art

However, never let it get to you though when you don't see the reaction you potentially imagine. I think it's important to set that mindset from get go.

Starting slow is likely a better idea since you would not run out of material from the start when most people will pass by without taking much interest, just the way of the world.

Lastly and most importantly, keep doing what you love, people come and go (especially the online variety), your passion is with you for life. Keep at it!

Are you able to explain what it is? Why it's necessary? Are you able to spike any interest?

Creating isn't just building. It's sharing and telling. Without a reason why others should be interested, they probably won't care.

I've found Marty Cagan's work helpful. The role that would be answering/exploring many of these questions would be a Product Manager in a product team, and there's literature for product management and product discovery.

What can happen? a) No one responds b) you get harshed on c) people communicate interest. You can't control b) so ignoreit, a) is the same result as not publishing anything but at least now you have a story. Put the effort into to making it easy for c).

In terms of interest, what specifically are you looking for in response to putting the project forward? A response to the idea, or a response to the effort?

In terms of the idea, tell your audience: - Who is "it" for, what's it for? If it's for you, generalize to people like you, eg "developers who are trying to keep track of their ideas" - What's the bet you are making? eg "it uses clustering to group ideas that you can then label as themes" - What would you like to know? eg "would this help you?, or how do you organize your notes and ideas now?"

In terms of the storytelling, lead with a demo or example that shows it doing something. If the code's not all there yet, mock that up. Above all, show what it does.

In terms of the effort, it's telling us the idea plus: - How does it work? eg "I used X Y and Z. It does A B and C". - How I solved it: eg" The hard part was designing A, where I first tried this, and then that, and what worked was this other thing". - What I don't know how to solve yet. This last thing the may be what gets you the most feedback, so don't bury that.

That was a huge mistake.

Just do whatever it is you want to do, stop talking about it.

A few other comments have mentioned that you really shouldn't expect anyone to care, and from those that do you should expect the majority of feedback to be negative - disagreements and nitpicks, etc.

This is absolutely true and you should embrace it! I wrote a blogpost [0] about that which you might enjoy. That's one of my blogposts that did actually 'hit' and got to the front page of HN. You'll see in my blog that I've written a few that have. You'll also notice that my most recent post has not and if you review my submission history you'll see that I've really really tried to get it to! Including title changes, etc. I like it just as much as any other post I've written, but have concluded at this point that HN, or at least the people who review posts on the new page, just don't care about it or find it interesting. That's fine!

If you review my submission history you'll also notice that my open source library react-frontload is a similar story. It's got about 450 github stars and a reasonable amount of people use it in their projects, but it's never, ever 'hit' on HN or anywhere else. Again, that is fine! I post it anyway every so often just to get it out there (I genuinely think it's a good tool and want people to find it!) but never really expect a different outcome to be honest. And I am sure even if it did hit, a majority of the feedback would be negative (and some of that quite useful).

That's all to say, keep the expectation of nobody caring and negative feedback for most of everything you publish because that's mostly what you'll get. Occasionally, you'll be pleasantly surprised by something hitting, but I don't think that there is any particular strategy to it other than the obvious thing of trying to publish only things you think are genuinely useful and of course, just actually publishing!

[0] https://davnicwil.com/negative-feedback-is-positive/

Joe Rogan talked about how he deals with the sheer size of his audience, he just doesn't pay attention.

Paul Graham and Sam Altman rarely comment here. Nor does Garry Tan or the other most famous folks. you will find a response from PC if an article references stripe directly..

So you have nothing to fear here, nothing to lose but potentially, potentially something to gain. So fear not. You are among friends.

Have you considered not sharing it with a bunch of strangers? I've regretted every contribution I've ever made to the internet in retrospect.

If creating your thing gave you joy, maybe that's enough.

But re what I want to get out of it, that is a great question. Took it for granted, but I can now see that figuring that out would change a lot.

Thanks!

When you've prepared a good home for your material (I have no idea what it is, writing? Music? Software? Something else?) then the work of getting people to it begins. For me, that means tweeting, chatting, "forumming" and generally being annoyingly plugging my stuff whenever I get the chance (and sometimes when I don't). You will likely receive very limited feedback from doing this, but it does help, and people will pick up your stuff eventually.

I expect very little, the things I make are also not very good, so that's probably part of it. I get "feedback" by searching for my stuff online, and I'm pleased when I find it popping up in linux distros or discussion fora, or youtube videos. But that's about it.

And just now begin classic business circle - try something - gather information on what you achieve - make conclusions - try again.

And accept fail - humans are not computers, we constantly make errors.

Sure, you need strong support to withstand all these things - find good girl, find some community with strong life values, and establish balance between your work/business and life.

I understand, all these parts of life puzzle are not easy to achieve, you may need to cut much from your old life; you may seen once, that you must to move to other district or even to other city or even to other country, but this is real way, it worth it.

In my experience programmers have to travel through 3 stages (not all get to stage 3).

1. You code to prove to yourself that you can

2. You code to prove to others that you can

3. You don't need to prove anything anymore, so now you code for utility (ie earning a living etc.) At this point the code is not the goal, the goal is something else -the code is a way to achieve that goal.

It's important to work through these steps - it's hard to jump to step 3 without "earning your chops" along the way. Those foundations are what make step 3 effective.

I say this for you to set the context of where you are at. You are not your code. your code is not perfect. You will always look back on "old" code (like from 6 months ago) and feel you can do better. That's called growth and it's a good thing. If you look back and your code from 5 years ago is "perfect" then either you're not growing, or you've peaked :)

Interestingly I also say this so you can understand what "level 3" feedback you'll get. Mostly people don't care about your code, they care about utility. So in that sense you can expect utility-based feedback, not code-based feedback. It may be hard to hear about something you've worked so hard on, but for most of us the "code" is not the goal - utility is. It's like looking at the Mona Lisa, the painting is great, but I really don't care how many nights you spent painting it. Which can be tough to hear based on your doubtless effort and hard work.

So skipping over the code part, you've presumably got some project that's offering some utility. You want to build an audience for that utility. Welcome to your next job. Turns out "build it and they will come" is a myth. "Selling" something to an audience is staggeringly hard. Ironically even more so when said offering is free. Ideally you have the audience before the product, but that's not how experience works.

So, hopefully you can determine what kind of person would use your project. then you hang out where they hang out. You help them as much as you can. You build a reputation for helping them. You point to your project when it's truly the best fit. It takes time, and effort, to build reputation in this way. And along the way you try and keep the product itself as something people want to use, something they latch onto.

So yeah, keep your expectations low, then drop them some more. It's a tough place to get started in, and I can predict that you'll almost certainly fail. But in failure you can learn, and that's important. The thing I'd say you might learn is that you need to build an audience before you build the tool. That's what I learned. But your experience will be your experience.

I say all this not to discourage you, but to encourage you. You are on a journey, and you are seeing others already at their destination. That didn't happen overnight, and they likely walked a very hard road to get to where they are. Try and get satisfaction along the road - figure out what worked, and where you went wrong. Learn as much as you can from failure. Then do it all again :)

Good Luck!

If anything I've regressed to step 1 20 years later after burnout, but that's another story :P

I've had the pleasure to work with a large number of programmers from different companies, backgrounds and training over a long period of time. I've seen this pattern repeated over and over, although as I say some people seem trapped in stage 1 or 2.

This is especially true for those who would rather spend a month coding something than spend $99 on a library to do the job. Conversely I saw a _lot_ of developers who saw only the end-goal (which typically meant getting paid) and would happily use whatever code they could get to get them to that goal quicker. I noticed that the ones who lived better, got paid more, were the ones that shipped, not the ones with "perfect code". [1]

>> I picked up programming as a child and have never wondered if I can do it, or cared if others knew I could do it, I have always been in step 3 programming to solve problems.

I too started young, and was self taught. I got through stage 1 pretty quickly, long before I'd even considered a career in this space. but certainly in the early days I was recreating things (games mostly) that were available at the time.

During University days I was lucky to rub shoulders with some very skilled others, and we constantly pushed each other to get better, be better, show something off, and so on. I went in there "knowing everything" and only by interacting with others did I find out that "all I could do was program." I didn't necessarily see it at the time, but the formal education part (the "science" part) really helped me along my career.

In my early work days I needed to prove my worth, demonstrate skills and so on. Once I was past that I became more productive - getting tasks done, not obsessing over every little naming detail. Build, release, iterate, perfect. Not build, perfect, perfect, iterate, never-release...

I would suggest (with no data obviously) that you went through stages 1 and 2 early, and perhaps quickly.

>> If anything I've regressed to step 1 20 years later after burnout, but that's another story

Perhaps it's burnout, or perhaps it's reflective of the limits you reached. As I learned new languages or moved into new spaces, I tended to repeat the stages, so perhaps you're just regrouping. I think we're always learning sometime new (hopefully) so sometimes it can feel like regression.

[1] Please don't read what I'm not saying here. Of course code matters, and like many I strive to produce the best code I can. But there's a balance. I use OpenSSL because despite the "ugliness" of some of that code, it's solid and it works, and I don't have time or energy to write something like that myself. I'm not advocating for using any old rubbish, I'm saying that quality libraries exist, and using them can often move a project quickly forward.

Restrict thy ego, and take all feedback with a grain of salt as everyone has bias even you!

if you can't attract the readers here, then you'll have to search where communities are that might be interested in your work. research that and then seek feedback in the places you find.

Ah yes, HN loves that and nobody here blocks those to skew the results.

> I suspect putting ads on

Really, you recommend that in a thread about managing expectations? If you want to lower your expectations then this is surely a good idea.

My recommendation would be to focus on one idea or one project and figure out whether you understand the problem space and the existing solutions well enough that you are sure that what you are doing meaningfully improves or goes beyond the current way of doing things. If it does, people with the same problem will take notice, give feedback etc. Some of the research papers I was involved in even lead to several job offers, invitations to give talks, interviews and quotes in popsci literature etc. (and briefly were on the front-page of this site). Twitter is surprisingly useful for this purpose as well, although of course this sort of already implies you have an existing network of people that know you or know what you are working on.

Of course peer-reviewed scientific contributions might be on the extreme end of content production. But at least to some degree my guess would be a similar logic applies to the creation of other content as well. Beginning with an idea, the idea has to pass through several filters for it to be considered worthy of a research effort and ultimate publication. Ideally you should be able to scrutinise an idea yourself, maybe do a prototype or begin writing a few paragraphs based on the premise of a piece. I regard ideas as separate from the actual manifestation in writing or code, however it can be extremely difficult or impossible to get an idea into a concrete instantiation. Ultimately you should be able to trust your own aesthetic or scientific judgement first, otherwise any kind of negative feedback can deter you.

I also strongly believe that quality is really the first thing to focus on, producing high quality content quickly should be a secondary optimisation goal, because as you gain experience, you will (hopefully) be able to naturally produce high quality writing / content with less effort and time investment. People will be able notice attention to detail and especially in the case of software you have to assume that for every issue that is raised a larger number of people encountered the same issue and never returned.

If you are primarily intending to write, there obviously is no better way to get better at writing than to actually write. Even if most of what you write you do not intent to publish.

There is more to be said, but in any case I can only encourage you to start. Since I have had a moderate amount of success in some instances, it has given me confidence to more freely share other work.

So I have just come upon an epiphany and a revelation to the product we have just built.

This product is both an (data) weapon for and a cure from (to ailing technologies) ;

---

The thing is, that to get here took DECADES of trying, iteration, design, mtgs, discussions, rejections, hurts (other YCs going with aspects of what we achieved, but profiting off it years after we applied)... etc...

--

KEEP GOING.

I have LITERALLY just this HOUR realized how our prduct is going to either:

1. Disrupt

2. Piss off

3. Profit

4. Get assassinated for.

--

KEEP PUSHING

It takes more than timing... timing is LAST.

You need all the supportive network in hand FIRST

(So youre telling me timing is first?)

No, but yes.

Timing is a few thing.

First you need to recognize the problem, devise a soolution...

THEN

You need to DETERMINE the best TIME for launch... (and that weighs in all the other bullshit)

(When to seek patents, funding, VC, Viral Interest, Traction etc...

All of these factors matter --- but Never stop striving to deliver.