The side-effects of sharing your work

  • It encourages you to document it, which is great for future reference
  • It forces you to turn thoughts into words, which helps you clarify your understanding
  • It forces you to evaluate what you’re doing with your time. If this isn’t worth sharing, is it worth doing?
  • It forces you to become familiar with the channels available for online collaboration. That means you know where to look if you want to leverage the work of others.
  • It discourages sloppiness. I redesigned bryanbraun.com last week and I also posted the Drupal theme publicly. I’ve been wanting to do that for a while, but it took some some serious code clean-up for me to be comfortable releasing it. Now it will be a lot easier for me to update and maintain. It’s certainly not perfect but it’s a whole lot better (…aaaand responsive! Try it on your phone).
  • You get to practice explaining things, giving demonstrations, even doing some marketing to some degree. All are great skills you should develop.
  • It acts as a portfolio, which a clear picture to future employers and partners of the kinds of things that you like to do.
  • It could benefit others and that feels good.

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