From the vault. Written now, about 2023.

In January 2023 I wrote down eight rules for how I wanted to work that year. I still think seven of them are right. Here is number five:

A project isn’t done until it is shared with the world.

Between writing that sentence and today I started a hundred and eighteen new repositories. I shipped almost none of them to anybody. A publishing system for independent authors. A markup language for interactive audio. A fact-checking pipeline that went through a whole non-fiction book claim by claim. A translation system. A protocol that lets an app run on your computer instead of on my bill. You have not heard of any of it, because I did not tell you.

Here is the part that makes it funny. I used to be good at this. Between 2008 and 2017 I published two hundred and ten posts – a blog, then a Tumblr. The first post on that blog is called “Blogging Again,” and it opens with me hoping the third time’s the charm and thanking a friend for pushing me to start. The only comment on it, three days later, is that friend saying he was happy to kick me back into it, because I had too many good ideas not to share. I wrote sixty-five posts that year. In 2008 I wrote one arguing that publishing what you learn is how you keep from losing it, and how you get other people to improve it. I believed that. I was right.

Then I stopped, in 2017, and did not publish anything for nine years. Nine years on, nine years off. And near the end of that quiet I sat down and wrote myself a rule I had already known and already followed, as though the thought were new. So the pattern, as far back as the record goes, is: someone pushes me, I turn out to be prolific, I stop, and a few years later I decide it is time to start sharing my work again. This is at least the fourth time.

I want to be careful about how I tell this, because there are two easy versions and both are wrong. The flattering one is that I was heads-down, quietly compounding, and now I emerge with the goods. The self-flagellating one is that I lost my nerve. What actually happened is simpler. I wanted this for years. I wrote it down twice. I was also exactly where I wanted to be – at home, while my kids grew up – and I wasn’t leaving early. Both were true, and one of them had an end date. I said last week what that date was.

The evidence is unusually complete, because I keep everything. I can tell you the month I first noticed the trade had a cost – November 2022 – because I wrote it down at the time:

By not focusing on business, I have had more time at home with the kids. However, it has kept me from meeting new people and making new friends… Time to fix this now.

“Now” took four years. I am not going to dress that up, and I am not going to apologise for it either. It was the deal, and I would take it again.

But here is the one I cannot explain away. In October 2023 – ten months after the rule – I sat down to start a YouTube channel, and I wrote the introduction. It opens: “So why is this guy starting a YouTube channel? Honestly, I have wanted to for years. I build tons of cool stuff… but then never share anything beyond that.” It runs to nineteen thousand words. Revision 1,306. The whole story, everything I had built and why, written out for an audience of nobody, because I then did not start the channel. In August of this year there is a note in my files titled “Todd Of Tomorrow Channel.” Still planning it.

So this is the first of a run of posts out of the vault. Real dates, real work, including the parts that did not work – and there is a lot of that. I was, and am, scared to put myself out there like this. I have to get the fuck over it. Publishing the rule I broke seemed like the only honest way to start doing what the rule says.