I have a handful of half-baked code ideas sitting around; often I have more ideas than I have time and/or skills to implement.

What’s different about today is that I’m finding that when I get one of these ideas, the first thing I’m doing is setting up a GitHub repo for what I want to do. (Consequently, I have two completely empty GitHub repos to my name, and one that’s a fork I haven’t worked on yet.)

The interesting thing about this is that it doesn’t ever cross my mind that I shouldn’t be sharing the code I end up making. There’s no benefit I can find to hiding what I’m doing or not learning publicly. It’s possible that someone could come across my projects and tell me that I’m doing things super-wrong, but even if that happens, at least I’ll know that I’m doing something in a less than optimal way.

And I don’t think that is going to happen, anyway. Being open is the only way to be, because no matter what I think I’m going to do, I’m pretty sure there is someone else somewhere who has wanted to do the same thing, or might be interested in the ideas I’ve had.

And when that happens, there’s a chance, no matter how small, that someone will come along and contribute to the projects. When that happens, it provides me with a chance to learn from someone who probably knows more and better than I do.