Learning in public before you feel ready

There is a quiet voice that shows up every time I go to publish something: who are you to write this? There are people who know far more. You will get a detail wrong and someone will notice.

That voice is not lying, exactly. It is just giving terrible advice.

The expert trap#

If the bar for writing about something is being an expert in it, you will write almost nothing, and you will write it years too late. By the time you feel qualified, the thing you struggled with is invisible to you. You have forgotten what it was like to not know, which is the exact moment your explanation would have helped someone.

The person one step behind you does not need the world expert. They need someone who was standing where they are standing last month, and can point.

Dead-ends are content#

The instinct is to publish the clean version: here is the thing, here is how it works, aren’t I clever. The honest version is more useful and, oddly, easier to write.

The wrong turn I took. The error message that made no sense until it suddenly did. The three hours lost to a config option I did not know existed. That is the part people actually search for at 1am. Polishing it out helps no one.

Write the version you wish you had found. That is almost always the messy one.

What it costs, honestly#

You will get things wrong in public. It happens. Someone corrects you, you learn something, you fix it. That is a good trade, not a catastrophe, and it is a lot less painful than the imagined version in your head.

The compounding is the real reason to do it. Each post is a small marker: here is what I understood on this date. A year of them is a map of how you think, which turns out to be worth more to the right people than a tidy list of skills.

So this is me taking my own advice. I am not the finished article. I am documenting the road while I am still on it, and if you are somewhere on the same road, pull up a chair.