I build mostly alone. No team, no standups, no one to hand a hard problem to at 1am. And I build mostly in public: the projects, the bug reports, the process, all out where anyone can see. Those two facts seem like they should contradict each other. They don’t. They’re the two halves of how I work.
The alone part is non-negotiable, and it has a name: deep work. The kind of understanding I’m after, really knowing why a streaming materialized view behaves the way it does or why a partition was invisible until it committed, doesn’t come from skimming. It comes from long, uninterrupted hours with one hard thing, and the willingness to stay confused longer than is comfortable. I read Designing Data-Intensive Applications slowly, on purpose. The depth is the whole point, and depth is quiet.
But alone isn’t the same as isolated, and this is where the public part comes in. I borrowed the frame from Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work: the idea of “scenius,” that creativity isn’t a lone genius but an ecology, a scene of people learning out loud near each other. You can be a scene of one and still belong to something larger, if you work in the open. Every bug I write up, every decision I document, is a small thread thrown out to whoever’s working on the same things. Some of them throw threads back.
So the workflow is: go deep alone, then show the work. The solitude is where the understanding is built; the publishing is how it stops being only mine. One feeds the other. Knowing I’ll write the thing down makes me understand it more honestly. Having understood it honestly makes the writing worth reading.
It’s not always comfortable. Building alone means the doubt is also alone. There’s no teammate to tell you the approach is sound, just you and the problem and the quiet. And building in public means the doubt is visible, which is its own particular vulnerability. But I’ve come to think both are features. The solitude forces real self-reliance. The audience, even a small one, keeps me honest and connected to a scene I’m choosing to join one post at a time.
Alone, for the depth. In public, for the scene. I don’t think you have to choose.
