Day 38: Building in Public
When I say “building in public”, you might think of companies and indie makers that have popularized the practice of publicly documenting their process of building businesses:
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Pieter Levels of Nomad List
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Andrey Azimov of Sheet2Site
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Michael Lynch of WanderJest, What Got Done, Is It Keto?, and Zestful
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Pat Walls of Starter Story and Pigeon
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…among others!
(One of these days, I might put together a more exhaustive list of makers working in the open because there’s quite a few now.)
But today, my dear reader, I’m here to talk about literally building in public. As in the set-up-shop-in-a-Starbucks-with-your-obnoxious-external-monitor kind:
The Setup and its Consequences
I used to be embarrassed about busting my full setup out in public, but now I’ve just gotten used to it. Having a setup that allows me to sit without turning into a hunchback (laptop stand) and instantaneously see the changes I make (external monitor) makes a big enough difference to my work that I’m okay with the occasional gawking.
What I didn’t expect though, is just how often people would come up to talk to me about my setup. I generally enjoy meeting new people, but I inevitably sometimes get tapped on the shoulder even when I have my headphones plugged in to advertise “hey I’m deep inside debugging some piece of code and there’s a bunch of stuff I’m juggling in my feeble brain pls don’t interrupt”. When someone does come up to me though, I know that they’re usually stepping outside of their comfort zone, so I take off my headphones to talk to them. Most of the time, we have a nice little exchange where they ask a bunch of questions about the monitor (what is it? who makes it? where did you get it? how do you like it?), maybe chat about what I’m working on or about some other random topic for several minutes, before they go on their merry way and I go back to work. Those interactions are often pretty fun and I enjoy having them. (Side note: Maybe I should pivot to selling portable external monitors at coffee shops?)
But sometimes, the questions about the monitor are actually a trojan horse for them to share their entire life story, which can be an unwelcome 30-minute diversion. But working in public means that you’ll come across your fair share of personalities, including the people who will continue talking as long as you haven’t asked them to stop. Here’s where the people-pleasing side of my personality bites me in the butt. I know that it’d be perfectly fine for me to say, “Hey, I’ve got to get back to work, but thanks for coming up and chatting.” but sometimes I’m just a wuss and don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. I think the hard part is that even if I’d like to get back to work, it’s still often kind of interesting hearing about other people’s lives and what they’re going through. Anyway, something to work on.
The Productivity Boost
When I work inside the privacy of my own room, it can be tempting to procrastinate doing some annoying, or hard, or annoyingly hard task by “taking a break for a few minutes” by checking my messages, Hacker News, Twitter, etc. That break usually ends up being longer than I intended and also breaks the momentum I had going.
Working in public completely destroys that temptation for me. It just feels inappropriate? I think my setup helps with this too because it’d be fairly comical to go through the trouble of setting up an external monitor, a laptop stand, a keyboard, and a wireless mouse, only to bust open YouTube and watch a music video.
The Unexpected Motivation
Sometimes, working in public provides motivation for my work in unexpected ways. When I see large groups of high schoolers all glued to their phones, I think about whether smartphones really have destroyed a generation. But the problem of our collective smartphone addiction becomes much more real when I get up to honor the ritual that we humans have engaged in since the dawn of our species: peeing.
A typical experience using the bathroom at a coffee shop: Standing in the line for the bathroom, behind a lady who’s scrolling on her phone, I can’t help but wonder if that’s also the reason why no one has come out of either of the two bathrooms for the last 10 minutes. Sure, maybe they’re both having a tough time dealing with an unexpected bout of food poisoning, but I’d bet $100 that at least one of them is straight chilling on the toilet gazing at their phone.
Case in point: I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn at a table in front of the bathroom, and I just saw someone come out with their phone in hand. We are so hooked on the endless stimulation provided by their phones that many of us can’t even last the few minutes required to take a dump or pee without reaching into our pockets to entertain ourselves.
Unlike in the situation with ending random conversations, I have no problem asserting myself in these cases and (gently) knock on bathroom doors if no one has come out for like 10 minutes. I’m not trying to pull a Tycho Brahe. Pretty much every time, there’s a flush and someone comes out within a minute of the knock.
Whichever presidential candidate announces that they’ll require all public bathrooms to be turned into Faraday cages automatically gets my vote.
Well, that was a weird rant. Anyway, I really like working in public and if you code, I’d highly recommend getting a portable external monitor because it’s a game-changer. This is the model I have, although this one is newer, cheaper, and is likely a better buy. Get ready for some fun interactions!