# Why write this stuff down?

> Why I started writing in public after twenty years of not.

- Source: https://nabkey.com/posts/field-notes
- Author: Chris Nabkey
- Published: 2026-04-22
- Tags: meta

Ever since I was 14 or 15 I've been playing with computers, and I eventually
made it into a job. I've always kept my work off of the internet, because I
thought it was embarrassing. It was never some final product, just something
I was building.

I've moved on from that. Instead of all of these little projects
laying around in my memory or Google Drive, or some backup on a NAS, I decided
to properly digest them and extract whatever was valuable from them.
It turns out that value is just remembering the fun I had when building some interesting toy.

Now that "software is cheap" and AI could write any of my old side projects in
a night of vibe coding, I had to decide what to do with those files, and how to 
feel about the time that I lost building some silly system for the sake of seeing
the Rube Goldberg machine operate.

> I'm realizing that the fun was never in the implementation itself. It _definitely_
> wasn't in the finished project. It was in playing with some new technology to see 
> how it worked.