Building IO Design in Public

Why I'm documenting every iteration of this site — from orbital navs to WebGL nebulas — instead of just shipping when it's done.

building in publicportfoliodesign

There's something uncomfortable about showing unfinished work.

Every developer I know has a graveyard of half-built portfolios — sites that got to 70% before the perfectionism kicked in and the project quietly died. Mine did too, for a long time.

This time I decided to do something different: ship it broken, iterate in public, and document what I'm learning along the way.

What "building in public" means here

For this site, it means a few things:

  • The source code is on GitLab, visible as I work on it
  • Every meaningful decision (why WebGL nebulas? why an orbital nav?) gets a post explaining the reasoning
  • I'm not waiting until it's "ready" to share

The orbital timeline in the hero section took three full rewrites. The first version was a flat list with hover states. The second was a radial layout that broke on mobile. The third — the one you see now — places nodes on a circle, auto-rotates, and aligns to the actual moon in the background video.

Was any of that necessary? Probably not. But the thinking behind it is worth writing down.

Why bother

There's a cynical read of "building in public": it's marketing. You're building an audience by making your process visible.

Maybe. But I think there's something more useful happening: it forces clarity. When you have to explain why you did something, you find out whether you actually knew. Writing this forces me to articulate decisions I'd otherwise make on instinct and forget.

The blog section of this site was marked "Coming soon" for two months. Every time I opened the orbital nav and saw the SOON badge on the Blog node, I felt a small amount of shame. That's what finally shipped it.

What's coming

Posts I'm planning to write:

  • The WebGL nebula shader — how a Three.js background became a three-day rabbit hole
  • AI engineering stack for 2026 — what I actually use vs. what I'd use if I were starting fresh
  • Why I built a Valheim Discord bot before building a portfolio
  • Lessons from Myth & Mimics: building AI-driven NPCs for tabletop RPGs

No fixed schedule. I'll write when I have something worth saying.