There is a version of building where every commit is a tweet, every side project has a landing page before it has any code, and every half-formed idea gets announced. I've never been able to work that way.
The problem with narrating the process is that it turns the audience into a stakeholder. Once someone knows you're building a thing, you feel accountable to them — and accountability to an imagined crowd shapes the work in ways that accountability to the actual problem does not.
What I've found: the most useful things I've shipped were built in private, refined past the point where I could still see them clearly, and only shown when there was something concrete to show. Not because secrecy is a virtue, but because the cost of changing direction drops to zero when no one is watching.
This is not advice. It's just the rhythm I've settled into. Some people work well in public; I don't. The portfolio page you're reading right now sat in a local Next.js project for six months before I pushed it.
The flip side is that building quietly can become an excuse for never finishing. The gap between "private" and "abandoned" is thinner than it looks. The rule I try to follow: a thing is not private, it is abandoned, if no one could theoretically use it.
By that definition, this note is no longer private. Make of that what you will.