Late last year, I made the conscious decision to start posting more of the stuff I make on the internet. When I’m working on something interesting, I write a blog post about it. If I make an app for myself, I put it on the internet for free. It’s only been a few short months, but I wanted to share some of my reasons for doing so and some of the highs and lows that have come from it.
Hopefully this encourages others to share more of their work, and make the internet (and the world) a slightly better place!
Why share stuff on the internet?
I guess the first question is why bother sharing stuff on the internet at all? I post everything on my blog for free. I make no money from ads. I make all of my apps free for people to use. So why bother?
Because people find it useful
The first, and possibly most important reason is because people will find your content useful. When I was first learning to code I followed a bunch of tutorials on Django from Simple is better than complex. Vitor wrote a bunch of tutorials on basic Django functionality that were already present in the documentation and no doubt a dozen other Django tutorials. But I appreciated the way he taught concepts practically and with minimal fluff. His content didn’t need to be groundbreaking to be useful to me. Neither does yours.
The most satisfying part of this is that when people find your stuff useful, they’ll tell you! I’ve had a bunch of people go out of their way to email me thanking me for posts i’ve written, often months after I’ve written them. There’s something warm and fuzzy about being contacted by people on the internet thanking you.
Don’t believe me? Here’s some actual things I posted on the internet and actual messages I got from people:
I posted a tutorial on how I created an IoT platform to keep my dog warm.
This is a great example of how devices like Arduino can be used to solve real world problems in a practical way.
Thanks for sharing your idea. Also, thanks for creating such an informative post.
I have changed your flair to “Mod’s choice” which means you will get top billing in this month’s monthly digest when it is published.
When there is a problem, it needs a solution. Very well done, OP!
Finally! A useful project. lol Awesome.
I’ve gotten pretty far this morning, I have 3 DS18B20’s reporting in temperature data to my Inventronix project and I’ve gotten the conditional action to trigger a discord message if the temperature exceeds a certain value (just testing things out). Very neat indeed.
I wrote up a blog post on how I got hacked. It blew up on HN, and people email me about the post on an almost weekly basis, chatting about docker and self-hosting.
Interesting that this got posted today, I also have a server on Hetzner (although I don’t think it’s relevant) and noticed yesterday that a Monero miner had been installed.
Good job. Examples like this, are why I don’t run a VPS.
I appreciate your article and ejoy reading it.
I just stumbled across your blog and read your latest article “I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning”. It was a nice read, I enjoyed it.
I create 3D models to solve little problems in my day-to-day life. To date they’ve been downloaded by 472 people! I get a cool email from Cults3D every time, and honestly it makes my day!
To stem the tide of dead internet theory
If you’re reading this at all, it’s likely that you’re a bit of a nerd and value the internet and all that it provides. You’re probably also a little sad about the tidal wave of shallow content and AI slop drenching us all. The good news is that just like climate change you can do something about it! No, you can’t fix the whole internet at once in the same way as you can’t demolish all the coal power plants. But, by making your own little garden of niche content you’re creating a place where other people can come to read information written by other people.
Because you learn things!
The internet is full of all sorts of interesting people who know all sorts of interesting things. Thanks to posting stuff on the internet I’ve learned loads of stuff about self-hosting, security, micro electronics and other practical things which interest me. Being wrong is often a feature, because people will often correct your mistakes and spot nuances in your situation that you’ll never get from an LLM.
They’ll also disagree with you, and this is a good thing. Publishing your thoughts for others forces you to sharpen your thinking and rationalise your decisions in a way that working on your own never could.
Just a note - you can very much limit cpu usage on the docker containers by setting –cpus=“0.5” (or cpus:0.5 in docker compose)c if you expect it to be a very lightweight container, this isolation can help prevent one roudy container from hitting the rest of the system regardless of whether it’s crypto-mining malware, a ddos attempt or a misbehaving service/software.
Hi,
I just stumbled across your blog and read your latest article “I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning”. It was a nice read, I enjoyed it.
I’m writing to you because I noticed that one of the mitigations mentioned in the article was to add some firewall rules. Well, you should be aware that when you expose container ports using Docker, these ports bypass firewall rules set on the host. There is a mention about this in the Docker documentation at http://docs.docker.com/engine/network/packet-filtering-firewalls/#docker-and-ufw
firewalld is a much better pick in current year and will not grow unmaintainable the way UFW rules can.
All solid gold!
Because interesting things happen to you
I’ve spent the last 5 years working remotely in the tech world, which has its perks but definitely lacks in ‘watercooler moments’. It seems like simple mathematical probability to me that if you put yourself out there, more people can find you and more opportunities present themselves. Since starting to post stuff I’ve chatted to people from Colorado to Singapore. I’ve spoken to angel investors looking to invest in projects and I’ve been asked to co-found companies. Posting about interesting projects has helped me to build a little community of people who like the same things I do!
Snark is like gravity
One of the main reasons I struggled to publish my work for so long, other than feeling like it wasn’t that groundbreaking or interesting, was that I felt like I was bearing my soul to the world. Publishing your stuff leaves you open to criticism that creating in your own bubble never does.
A couple of thoughts here. Firstly, know that when you post stuf on the internet you will get snark. It’s inevitable. There are people who just hang around on the internet waiting for something they can shit on. These people exist in every community. Facebook has the racist uncles. Reddit has this weird ultra left-wing competition for who can be more woke. Hacker News has people who like to flex their immense technical prowess and dress up weird views behind a thin veneer of ’technical objectivity’.
Once you accept this as a universal constant, like gravity, it becomes much easier to deal with. If you know you’re going to get some snark then you’re ready for it. You can then simply ignore it, filter out the signal from the noise and move on.
There’s another interesting thing about snark, is it often comes before the useful stuff. I said these people were just hanging around on the internet right? That means they’ll be the first to comment. Do not be discouraged. My limited experience has found that as your content ages, snark drops off but real signal increases. I had a dozen people tell me my IoT platform was dumb within 5 minutes but a guy tell me he was using it to measure the temperature of his wood boiler 6 weeks later.
A few months ago, I decided to start publishing my work. I’ve dealt with some snark, sure. But I’ve also helped people solve real problems, learned things I wouldn’t have otherwise, and had conversations with interesting people I’d never have met. The internet can be good, but only if people like us keep putting real stuff out there.
So what are you waiting for? Publish your stuff. I’ll read it :)