Put Your stuff Out There

If you are like me, you have many specific interests, thoughts and projects you work on. Why should those only stay in your head? Maybe you just don't care or are afraid of how others might judge your work? Let me convince you to publish your stuff.

Initially I started this blog to share my solutions for cool CTF challenges. Eventually, I found out about Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon (I did not read the whole book but a summarization of it) and it had a profound impact on my opinion regarding this topic.

Here is another awesome Blogpost over at brainbaking.com about this topic. I'm essentially writing this to spread the word.

Publishing your work brings benefits not only for others but also for yourself!

Say you just published a small post about your greatest passion: Coming up with recipes where the sum of all letter indices of each ingredients letters equates to a prime number. Someday, someone speaking another language than you, living in another country far away, and maybe even using another code editor than you may read it and think: YES! Maybe they will even get in contact with you or build upon your idea. And you could even land a job!!1

Like the idea but still afraid of how others might judge your work? Think about it this way: By being yourself and projecting this to the outside world, you will be way more likely to get into contact with people you are naturally compatible with while people who negatively judge you without any critical thought based on your work alone might as well just not be worth your time :)

Finally, another benefit of showing your work is that you also document your thoughts and projects for yourself, like growing a little garden. For me personally, this gives me a lot of inner peace. The feeling of finishing a project and then putting it out there for someone to discover is just a good feeling.

So, however odly specific and nerdy your thoughts and projects may be, please, please just share them! They don't even need to perfect or complete by any means!

This is the Internet, yo

You can of course use any platform you like, but having your own website is EXTRA nice! Why? Because this is 100 % your own place! Wanna show of your awesome art in the background on the index page of your blog? Easy! Pick your own font, colors, layout. I've learned a bit of HTML and CSS to build a static site generator which was really fun! I've seen so many cool personal websites: just some examples.

Modern social media design philosophy seems to strongly gravitate towards clean and uniform interfaces, which certainly has its appeal but I find it gives too few power to the user to customize their profile. Regaining the ability to freely express yourself can be quite fun and designing your own page is really rewarding. just look at how beautifully chaotic websites used to look. Let's revive this spirit a bit! Oh and don't forget to link other cool places!

Cheers!