Posting Into The Void

I spent the last few weeks and months working on my personal site. I shipped Projex — a shadcn-style component library for developer portfolio pages — posted about it on X to silence, posted about it on Reddit to near-silence, and sat with that feeling for a while today.

It doesn't feel great.

The Specific Kind of Demoralizing

It's not burnout exactly. I'm not tired of building. I enjoy it. This has become a hobby, and I mean that genuinely, not as a cope, but because the time I spend building doesn't feel wasted even when nothing comes of it.

What stings is the silence after you share something.

You build a thing. You think it's useful. You give it away for free. You're not asking for money, you're not running ads, you're not trying to acquire users in some predatory growth-hack way. You just want to know someone tried it. Maybe filed an issue. Maybe said "this is neat." That's it.

Instead: nothing.

Reddit Is Broken For This

Reddit right now is flooded with AI-generated spam and people shilling SaaS products that barely work. I hate that. And I hate that when I go to post about something I genuinely built and care about, I feel like one of them.

That's the uncomfortable part. I'm not shilling. Projex is free. I'm not asking for anything. But the act of posting about your own work in that environment feels gross now, because the context is so poisoned.

I don't want to learn marketing. I don't want to become someone who optimises posts for engagement. My time is genuinely better spent getting better at building. That's where I am right now.

X Isn't Working Either

I don't like X. Posting there feels like talking into a void. Maybe that changes with audience size (probably does), but right now it's not where I want to spend energy.

I was hoping Projex might get a small handful of users. Not thousands. Not virality. Just a handful of developers who found it useful and maybe said so. That hasn't happened yet, and that's what knocked me sideways a bit today.

DevBreakdown and The Fuzzy Middle

I've also been stalling on DevBreakdown — my AI model and subscription comparison site. Partly because the affiliate angle I originally had in mind is basically a non-starter now. Partly because the space moves so fast I can hardly keep up with it myself, let alone maintain a site tracking it.

And then there's the motivation problem: if I'm earning nothing from it, and it's hard to keep current, and I'm already feeling the silence from Projex... why start another thing that shouts into the same void? The entrepreneurial conundrum is familiar territory here — the gap between having ideas and actually executing on them.

I don't have a clean answer to that. What I do know is that the clarity problem is real. I know what I want DB to be, but the steps between "start" and "ship something useful" are fuzzy. That fuzziness is what kills momentum before you even begin.

Why I'm Still Going

I kept coming back to something today. I've shipped more in the last few months than most people who talk about building ever do.

That's not a flex. It's just what I noticed. And it made me realise: component libraries don't go viral. They get quietly discovered by developers who need them. npm downloads tick up without fanfare. Someone uses your thing without ever telling you.

Maybe that's already happening with Projex. I genuinely don't know.

I know this is a long game. Knowing that doesn't make today any less shit. But my real goal was never a Reddit post going off. It's building a portfolio of work that compounds, covering my AI subs with something I made, and eventually having enough momentum that the audience finds me rather than me chasing it.

€100/month net neutral would genuinely feel like a win right now. That's not a low bar out of pessimism. It's a concrete, honest first milestone.

Today I'm going back to the Straico API proxy I half-built a while ago. It's broken in ways I want to fix. It's contained. It's mine. And finishing it will feel like a win without needing anyone to validate it.

That's enough for today.

There's something underneath all of this I keep coming back to: the essay making the rounds about not following your passion makes a case for accepting where you are. But I think there's a version of that argument that quietly recommends giving up on building anything outside the office. That's the part I can't get on board with.