Coding When No One Is Watching

My Thoughts on Posting to Social Media

I’ve been keeping a strong coding streak these past few months — showing up almost every single day, usually for an hour or more. It feels good to finally work on projects that I care about.

For a while, I was trying to post updates to Twitter/X for #100DaysofCode to stay accountable and maybe connect with other devs. But after a couple of weeks, I thought to myself, “why bother posting anything if no one is watching?”

Truth is, I’ve never been a huge fan of social media. Keeping up with it — especially when you’re starting out and hardly anyone sees your work — feels exhausting. And I’d much rather spend that energy coding or writing for my own blog.

Still, I am sure every dev has felt this way at some point in their coding journey.

They are learning, building things and then posting their progress on social media as a way to learn in public.

Only nobody sees it so it feels like you are working in a vacuum…

Yelling into an abyss where no one can hear or see you. You become invisible in a way.

But you grind on.

You have projects to build you are really excited about. And are lost in the packet flow most of the time.

Posting your journey when you don’t have an audience, almost makes no sense and is kind of a waste of time IMO.

Sure, some bot might see it and message you, but is that really worth it?

What I Have Been Working on

OK — now for what I’ve been working on and what’s next.

Lately I’ve been creating a Hugo theme from scratch.

My goal is to build a lightweight, reusable template I can use for multiple static sites on topics I care about.

I want to make it easy to switch color schemes, change self-hosted fonts, and keep a consistent layout across sites — without them all looking identical.

I recently became interested in fermenting my own hot sauce. Looking around online, I saw a couple of sites that looked like your typical cookie-cutter WordPress cooking themes.

They were bloated and slow with annoying pop-ups and tracking.

And WHY do they NEED so much JavaScript?

The first thing I though of when doing this research, was that I could build a better site. I know almost nothing about fermenting hot sauce, but I am willing to put in the work to learn how.

Maybe I could build a site where I can track my progress and show the process of fermenting. Document the struggles I went through trying to figure it out as well.

It could be like this blog. Learning to code and build things in public, just with a different audience.

I may be able to help them out by building a super fast, clean static site that is easy to navigate and use.

It would look different, have no extra bloat like tracking or annoying pop-ups and use almost no JavaScript, perfect!

OK, maybe a little JS would be necessary.

A light/dark toggle and a way to collapse the navbar into a hamburger menu that works on mobile would be nice, but other than that I probably won’t use any other JS.

Just because you can use JS, dosen’t mean you should, and I wish a lot more devs would take that seriously, but I digress…

Anyway, I am building that theme using straight HTML and CSS so it will be fast and score really well with speed rankings like Google’s Lighthouse score.

Site speed is really important these days, and having a slow site with a bunch of bloat on it just tends to piss people off, so I am going to try and build the site I wish I would land on.

I will also do the same thing in a few other niches, but that is a few months down the road.

All that to say that I have been coding everyday, and will continue to code as much as I can, but this is turning more into #100DaysofDevops.

I say that because I am not only writing code, I am writing documentation, configuring my self-hosted server, optimizing my workflow and trying to figure out the best way to deploy my sites with minimal effort.

Once I have a system in place that works well, I can focus on the next project, like self-hosting my own chatbot, which I think would be really cool.

Conclusion

The truth is, there will be plenty of times when it feels like nothing you do matters. Nobody’s reading your posts. Nobody’s noticing your progress. It can feel like you’re just working into a void.

But that’s exactly when you keep going — not for the nameless bots scraping your site, but for the one person who might stumble on your work and feel a little less alone.

That’s why we do this.

Stay curious. Stay in control.