What is debugging in public, and why I do it.
A brief on why I'm starting to post embarrassing stuff online.
The name of this series was inspired by the Building in Public movement, where indie hackers build (and break) their products in public.
That’s fun, humbling, and informative—sure, but you know what's even more fun?
Sharing your journey as you make peace with the wet blob inside your skull and all the other particles that constitute "you". To which you’re probably thinking that I have a weird definition of ‘fun’, which I do.
But what I really mean is that I don't see nearly as much Jungian, psychological, or self-exploratory stuff being discussed among the analytical people I know—which is to say, tech people.
What is debugging in public?
It’s recognizing that your brain is a programmable machine— and that in the beginning, you weren’t doing most of the programming. As you become increasingly conscious, you discover bugs (some of them pretending to be features), algorithms with the efficiency of a bogosort, and legacy code. A lot of legacy code. Nevertheless, you gather the courage to start clearing your technical debt, your coping mechanisms, your shitty habits. As you do, you document and share your journey with the world. You debug in public.
Why debug in public?
When I first thought about it, all that came to my mind were reasons as to why I shouldn't do it :
You invite people to criticize the core parts of your personality and being. Unlike code, (or perhaps like it), not every part of you can nor should be changed.
You expose your psychological weak spots, allowing manipulative people to gain the upper hand.
You have to share actual, intimate moments from your life in order for the theories you're talking about to make sense. As a private person, this was not a pleasant thought.
It's very out of the norm, even among the weird kids. The only people I know who've done something similar, to be honest, are Kaj Sotala, with his piece on depression, and Neal O'Grady.
People will probably disregard me or lose respect for some of the things I’ll say here.
But I wasn't convinced to give up. After a few weeks of mulling over it, I realized: There's no reason I should do it. I want to do it because:
I'd like to find and learn alongside people interested in this style of personal development. I want to help others in my place, by letting them know they’re not the only ones facing these problems, and by sharing my approach to things. Every time I've created something valuable and out of the norm, the universe has coNNeCtEd me with people who appreciate it (and whom I appreciate).
I struggled to write about myself while applying to college last year. I realized that was because I didn’t know myself, a fact that became painfully apparent while trying to decide what to do with my life in the midst of 2020. Debugging oneself is hard, and the more resources out there, the better.
This will hold me accountable— if I find a destructive pattern, it means I either find a way to change it or suffer the humiliation of others knowing that I'm stagnating. I’m also theoretically a time billionaire. So I should be able to fuck up a few times and have people pass it off as the foolishness of the youth.
No one else will do this in the way I want to, so I’ll take up the challenge, even if it’s scary and embarrassing. Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the weird kid among the weird kids until it’s no longer weird.
Phew, that was a lot of blabbering. But perhaps that’s the point. Open-source therapy like you do with random scripts and hacked-together code.
Here are my first three issues:
I have another half a dozen posts ready, and more in the queue, which I’ll be posting roughly every Sunday. The next issue will likely be “How Carl Jung Changed My Life“. If you’d like to follow this journey with me, consider subscribing. But really, I’m hoping you’ll join me in debugging in public. Pair programming is much more fun, after all :)
Related:
Robin Robert's Making Your Mess Your Message