Ah, self-promotion: a perennial HN topic. What I've seen is that there is a rift between the typical hacker and self-promotion.
As with most things, it's about balance, which Sacha hits upon. Success means that you need to self-promote, but at the right times with the right stuff to back it up. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to hackers/developers who are so vehemently against self-promotion to the point of blindness, and then, in the same breath, complain that other people who are less talented are getting too much attention by self-promoting.
I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-promotion. And, I assume, a lot of other hackers have this same mentality.
But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what you're doing. It'll make you feel better, and also propel you to ship even more stuff. And in this way, self-promotion isn't only to tell other people that you're doing stuff, but it's also to get feedback and improve yourself. One cannot make great work in 100% isolation.
What a lot of hackers fail to realize is that by making something work and communicating to other people about it, you're already in the top percentile of people. It's OK to talk about it! Heck, it's also OK to promote it on HN and all the other usual channels. People will appreciate you sharing it. And the haters? Well, they'll always be there, even if you wait to perfect it. :)
So, if your head is swirling with thoughts that you may be too self-promotional, you probably aren't. Just share it.
PS. Dustin Curtis should pursue a career in marketing. Curating a network of quality bloggers would be a great move for him. He knows how to promote, design, and curate very well.
"I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-promotion...But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what you're doing."
I think this is completely spot on, and it took me a long time to realize it. Recently, I'd been wanting to set up continuous deployment at our shop but I didn't know exactly the right way to do it. I also didn't post larger blog posts often at the time. I finally decided I wanted to post about doing continuous deployment with jenkins and capistrano [1].
So I set about to make it work. It's not the most elegant solution, and there are at least 3 things that are suboptimal with my method that I wouldn't use for a mission critical production use case...but we're using it for our own internal apps and our website, and so we don't care that much about those suboptimal bits.
Writing a blog post about how we were doing it generated tons of traffic to our site, and it also provoked a couple of conversations whereby I figured out a couple of things to do to make my method perfect - and subsequently gives me a new blog post later to write :)
Anyway, just wanted to throw in an anecdote - definitely think too many people get buried under the weight of 'but i'm not perfect yet'
As with most things, it's about balance, which Sacha hits upon. Success means that you need to self-promote, but at the right times with the right stuff to back it up. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to hackers/developers who are so vehemently against self-promotion to the point of blindness, and then, in the same breath, complain that other people who are less talented are getting too much attention by self-promoting.
I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-promotion. And, I assume, a lot of other hackers have this same mentality.
But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what you're doing. It'll make you feel better, and also propel you to ship even more stuff. And in this way, self-promotion isn't only to tell other people that you're doing stuff, but it's also to get feedback and improve yourself. One cannot make great work in 100% isolation.
What a lot of hackers fail to realize is that by making something work and communicating to other people about it, you're already in the top percentile of people. It's OK to talk about it! Heck, it's also OK to promote it on HN and all the other usual channels. People will appreciate you sharing it. And the haters? Well, they'll always be there, even if you wait to perfect it. :)
So, if your head is swirling with thoughts that you may be too self-promotional, you probably aren't. Just share it.
PS. Dustin Curtis should pursue a career in marketing. Curating a network of quality bloggers would be a great move for him. He knows how to promote, design, and curate very well.