I have noticed a ridiculous asymmetry in the way I work.
I can spend days investigating a technical problem, designing something, implementing it, reviewing it, breaking it, rebuilding parts of it, and generally disappearing into the work without much resistance.
Then comes:
Tell people about it.
And suddenly we have encountered the final boss.
This shows up particularly clearly with open source. I genuinely like contributing to things. I like building tools. I like figuring out why something is broken. I like technical conversations when there is something concrete to talk about.
What I do not naturally enjoy is the machinery surrounding visibility.
Posting repeatedly. Promoting. Maintaining presence. Finding the correct community. Saying, essentially, “Hello, please pay attention to this thing I made.”
I can explain something I built for an hour if somebody asks me about it.
Apparently the impossible sentence is:
I made this. You should look at it.
For a while I treated that as another personal deficiency I was supposed to eliminate.
I am less convinced now.
Maybe the answer is not becoming somebody who enjoys every part of the process. Maybe the answer is finding people whose strengths point in a different direction from mine.
Somewhere there is probably a person who enjoys helping interesting work become visible but would rather not spend three hours debugging a synchronization problem.
We might be extremely useful to each other.
So perhaps what I need is not a better social-media strategy.
Perhaps I need a PR buddy.
Preferably one whose brain is compatible enough with mine that neither of us needs a user manual for the other.