Work with the garage door up

4/23/2026 at 2:24:50 PM

Genuinely curious where the best place online to do this is today.

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.

by mattkevan

4/23/2026 at 2:35:13 PM

Niche forums are still alive and well.

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.

by burnt_toast

4/23/2026 at 2:30:43 PM

> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]

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.

by simonsarris

4/23/2026 at 8:01:10 PM

Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.

by cyberge99

4/23/2026 at 10:15:06 PM

I think the best way to do this today is having your own site, be it in the shape of a blog, digital garden or whatever and then syndicate, following POSSE[0], in case of wanting community or distribution.

[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

by frangonf

4/23/2026 at 3:00:25 PM

I would begrudgingly suggest LinkedIn. I have seen a bunch of professors doing it there successfully. There they also promote their Substack which LinkedIn allows. I remember Elon had banned Substack on X at one point.

by malshe

4/23/2026 at 2:50:10 PM

> would have been Twitter, but

Still is (X), despite the people who would fool themselves into thinking otherwise.

by stronglikedan

4/23/2026 at 3:09:04 PM

X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.

by threetonesun

4/23/2026 at 3:15:52 PM

Does substack have a built in community like that? I thought you really needed to get people there or use it for the newsletter feature.

by tayo42

4/23/2026 at 2:46:02 PM

isn't it called x? why do you say twitter?

by oliver236

4/23/2026 at 3:13:32 PM

It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.

Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?

by ghostpepper

4/23/2026 at 2:59:59 PM

Cause X is a stupid name

by wpm

4/23/2026 at 3:00:48 PM

And twitter isn't?

by cortesoft

4/23/2026 at 3:27:01 PM

No, it isn't. Twitter was absolutely brilliant marketing. It perfectly encapsulated what the site was at the time.

X is just a letter the current owner likes. It has absolutely no relevance to what the site does or is for.

by zaphar

4/23/2026 at 2:51:20 PM

because everyone deadnames things they don't like, while claiming it's somehow evil for others to deadname things they like. i.e., they're virtue signalling

by stronglikedan

4/23/2026 at 3:14:46 PM

> everyone

Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?

by kashunstva

4/23/2026 at 1:29:10 PM

I very much agree with this author, and the sort of open source ethos it embodies.

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?

by mapontosevenths

4/23/2026 at 1:37:48 PM

I was also a corporate stooge (at both Apple and Microsoft). One of the biggest differences in culture was exactly this point. At Apple, it was encouraged to share your successes and failures in real time across teams. At Microsoft, there was so much infighting and competition that you tended to share nothing until you were ready to release. For example, someone on the Windows team wouldn't want to give away a cool solution that could be "stolen" by the dev tools team. This resulted in walled gardens that were protected at all costs.

by LatencyKills

4/23/2026 at 2:19:48 PM

[dead]

by draw_down

4/23/2026 at 2:18:56 PM

So long as this is about sharing on the Internet, the fun part is that no one is forced to be your neighbour. The question becomes whether you want to create the opportunity for kindred spirits to find you or not.

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.

by Lalabadie

4/23/2026 at 1:40:40 PM

Seems related to the explore/exploit problem, where the standard answer is related to the answer to the Secretary Problem[0], with the important caveat that it depends on whether "passing" on an opportunity legitimately makes it unavailable in future.

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.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

by throwpoaster

4/23/2026 at 9:25:37 PM

I'd never heard of the secretary problem, though like all of us I've been in that situation hundreds of times. Fascinating read! Thank you.

This is one of those (increasingly rare) internet conversations that might lead to legitimately better outcomes in my life.

by mapontosevenths

4/23/2026 at 12:28:36 PM

How do you learn to share what you do, when you're not used to sharing at all? Should one accept that noone will read 99% of what one shares and just use sharing as a way to record and reflect on own process?

by dmos62

4/23/2026 at 1:30:28 PM

> Should one accept that noone will read 99% of what one shares and just use sharing as a way to record and reflect on own process?

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.

by asa400

4/23/2026 at 12:59:51 PM

I've "built in the open" before that was a thing.

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.

by theshrike79

4/23/2026 at 12:40:25 PM

Yes. The very act of sharing is a form of "rubber ducking" [32] which will help, even if you're Truman and nobody else exists.

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".

[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

[99] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59

by bombcar

4/23/2026 at 12:46:41 PM

I think if you make the sharing intentional to specific groups or specific people with high quality work, people will be interested.

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.

by twosdai

4/23/2026 at 1:22:23 PM

I do exactly the second part of this. Nobody is going to read what I write, so I just write about what I did, how I did it and what I was thinking when I did it. Not everything has to be written as a perfectly cited essay, but often just noting down what you did can be helpful in the long run. Sometimes I've thought of something, remembered that I did something useful and related in the past and dug out an old article to consult my previous thoughts

by voidUpdate

4/23/2026 at 1:19:28 PM

1. "Nobody" will likely read it. Don't overthink, don't be shy. 2. If you don't post you won't put the effort in to make it good. Finish your thoughts, fix your grammar, add headers and bullets and tags and pictures.

by sanex

4/23/2026 at 1:28:21 PM

I like the concept of this, but it does feel horrific to share on most social media. I already share a lot of work I do in local dev chats etc - but there's something about the X algorithm that makes sharing anything feel terrible.

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.

by endymion-light

4/23/2026 at 1:40:16 PM

I enjoyed the sentiment, thank you for sharing.

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.

by dcchuck

4/23/2026 at 2:47:40 PM

I actually made a Wikipedia browser directly inspired by Andy's blog: https://steezeburger.com/wikipedia-browser/

I find it a really intuitive way to browse notes and to get a feeling for the relationships between your collected information.

by steezeburger

4/23/2026 at 3:28:00 PM

This is great! Thank you :heart:

by dcchuck

4/23/2026 at 2:25:26 PM

Goes both ways. I had a phase of trying this and found I had to invest as much or more effort figuring out how to document stuff for the eyes of an outside observer as I did on the actual task. Guess maybe the answer in my case is to not make it accessible, but does that defeat the purpose?

by BoostandEthanol

4/23/2026 at 5:29:35 PM

Figuring out how to document stuff for others forces you to think things through at a deeper level yourself, and that’s the main point of the idea being presented here. Forcing yourself to organize your own thoughts is where the personal growth comes from.

by orev

4/23/2026 at 2:45:34 PM

I don't think it defeats the purpose. Your audience will find you. Once that happens, you will start getting feedback, and then you can decide how to handle that. Closing the door just means your audience can't find you in the first place.

by stonogo

4/23/2026 at 1:18:56 PM

This is one of the core spirits of open source

by singpolyma3

4/23/2026 at 2:11:43 PM

I don't know if I trust this as much as I did in the past. There's lots of competition out there. Lots of AI companies that want to slurp up data. It's a nice warm and fuzzy thing to say but I don't think it helps you, it just helps competitors get the jump on you.

by booleandilemma

4/23/2026 at 2:44:44 PM

Fear of AI companies "slurping up data" being used as a rationale for not sharing anything is one of the most underrated harms of the whole current AI mess.

by simonw

4/23/2026 at 3:11:03 PM

It’s not a fear. It’s reality. It’s literally happening on HN right now.

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

by dimes

4/23/2026 at 3:59:00 PM

That's not an AI company "slurping up data", that's someone using AI tools to accelerate their own personal clone of a project.

by simonw

4/23/2026 at 4:34:43 PM

I think you're missing the point. The game (no pun intended?) has changed. Working with the garage door up has become a liability.

by booleandilemma

4/23/2026 at 6:57:26 PM

Doesn't feel particularly different to me, I've been publishing my side projects as open source code on GitHub for over a decade.

The effort required to adapt them has dropped, but I've always exposed them to being adapted.

by simonw

4/23/2026 at 7:56:38 PM

> Doesn't feel particularly different to me

> 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.

by dimes

4/23/2026 at 8:17:08 PM

If I cared about people copying my projects and ideas I wouldn't put them on GitHub with a liberal open source license.

by simonw

4/23/2026 at 4:38:26 PM

I completely agree. Honestly I wish we could go back to before AI. I don't like where it's taking us at all. Changing how we write code is just the beginning. Next we'll be replacing humans altogether. I've already had an interview with a soulless "AI recruiter" bot. We can't go back now of course, but one can dream.

by booleandilemma

4/23/2026 at 1:37:01 PM

I recommend running this by legal if you are funded, however, I am not a lawyer.

by throwpoaster

4/23/2026 at 2:43:36 PM

I'm kind of disappointed that this is about social media presence and not the physical world. I am a big proponent of working with your garage door up, quite literally, and I make it a point to do projects in my garage or my driveway, visible to my neighbors. I also make it a point to interact with my neighbors if they're doing a project and offer a hand or company (if they're interested in either). This is part of how I've built community around me in the places I live. Doing things like helping someone replace a valve cover gasket and spark plugs at 11PM so they could get to work in the morning when they were already too deep in fixing their only car; baking bread and running my smoker in the driveway and then offering BBQ sandwiches to my neighbors; setting up my jobsite table saw and miter saw in the driveway when doing home improvement projects, only to find out a neighbor is a tiler and can help me finish out my shower after I do the framing; etc.

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.

by tristor

4/23/2026 at 2:45:25 PM

This works pretty well for physical projects but I think coding in your garage with the door open would not invite a lot of conversation or connection?

Maybe it would be a nice wfh office in the summer, though.

by nemomarx

4/23/2026 at 2:04:34 PM

Could someone from california explain "garage door up" reference? Is it like pretending to be early apple or HP, and starting chip factory on backyard reference? Or some sort of open door policy?

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!

by jdrormdj

4/23/2026 at 2:16:10 PM

I believe you may be overthinking it a tad. I take it just to mean "work in the open".

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.

by somehnguy

4/23/2026 at 2:23:50 PM

I get leaving garage door open, just for ventilation, but I always lock the main gate on driveway.

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!

by jdrormdj

4/23/2026 at 7:20:54 PM

You're thinking way too literally.

by criddell

4/23/2026 at 3:30:11 PM

There is a massive difference between leaving the door open so people can come in and talk versus paying no attention to them commandeering your dangerous tools. Again I think you're overthinking it.

by somehnguy

4/23/2026 at 3:28:39 PM

It's about leaving it open while you're working. You'd still close it when you're not around.

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.

by fwip

4/23/2026 at 2:22:05 PM

> 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!

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.

by IncandescentGas

4/23/2026 at 2:12:49 PM

I think "garage door up" means "in the open".

by criddell