No One Builds in Public
laike9m.comSince joining the indie hacker community a few months ago, I've been observing what everyone is doing with great curiosity. One thing I immediately noticed, is that everyone talks about "build in public".
At first I thought, "OK, everyone is doing it, it must be good". But a few months later, I'm starting to have some questions. I write about them in this article.
Lately my big creative outlet has been photography where I've found out people in social media are much more interested in finished, polished results, than in my "creative process". One of the ways that "midjourney artists" annoy people is in showing blocks of 9 images they get out of the machine without any curation.
More recently I've been developing a process to make a kind of image that is unique and different from what people have seen before (even if they don't quite realize it). This involves developing a process of studio photography of individual objects which involve numerous details from "how do I position the camera and the objects" and "how do I consistently get the right focus" and "how do I light the objects?" and then after that working on software for compositing the objects which I suspect is going to need to use very sophisticated algorithms to get really good results. It's very likely that once I get the software running I'm going to find I did the photography wrong and to get the results I want I'm going to feed back what I learn later in the process. Some of the objects might be unavailable at that time which could mean some parts of the project will be delayed to next summer.
I think about posting about the work I'm doing but I've decided against it because I don't get a lot of benefit from doing so and, if people do recognize the value of what I'm doing, why should I help potential competitors avoid all the mistakes I'm going to make? '