Six products, and you can't see one of them
Every repository is private. Two of the apps are on both stores. A stranger still has to take my word for all of it.
I have taken six products from an empty repository to something people use.
Two of them are live on the App Store and Google Play right now. One is a register a jeweller can run his shop on. One is a career tool that is entirely mine.
You cannot see the code for any of them.
Every repository is private. My GitHub profile has a README that explains what I have built, because the repositories themselves explain nothing. A page of text, describing work nobody is allowed to look at.
I did not decide this. I drifted into it.
Every one of them was private for a good reason
That is what makes it hard to notice.
Client work is private because it belongs to the client. Work I do for my employer is theirs. Anything with a real customer's data near it stays shut. Half-finished things are embarrassing. And when you make a new repository, private is the default.
Seven correct decisions in a row. The sum of them is a body of work nobody can check.
I thought the work was the proof
This is the part I had wrong for years.
I believed that if I shipped enough real things, the shipping would speak for itself. Do the work, and the work stands as the evidence of the work.
It does not. The work is the work. Proof is a separate thing, and you have to make it on purpose.
Nobody is going to take your word for it. Not a client deciding whether to pay you. Not an operator deciding whether to hand you their business. Not anyone trying to work out if you are any good.
And take my word for it is the weakest sentence a builder can say.
Two of them are public and it still does not help
Anyone can download those two apps today. That should settle it.
It does not, because a downloaded app does not tell you who wrote it. Anybody can point at a live app and say they built it. There is no line between my name and that binary that a stranger can follow.
Public and attributable are not the same thing. I had those two confused.
What I am doing about it
Nothing clever. Three things, all boring.
I am pulling the reusable parts out of what I build and publishing them properly. Not the products — the pieces. The part that holds a slot while somebody pays. The part that makes a payment webhook safe to receive twice. Small, specific, useful to someone else, and mine to give away.
I am writing this every week, whether or not anybody reads it.
And I am going to stop treating private as the default and start choosing it.
Why now
Someone asked me to prove what I had done. Not in a hostile way. A reasonable person asking a reasonable question.
I had a list. I had two app store links. I had a README.
I did not have one thing they could open.
That was an uncomfortable afternoon, and it should have happened years earlier.
If you have been head down shipping, go and look at what a stranger can actually see of your work. Not what you know you did. What they can check.
It might be less than you think.