I’ve always been curious in nature and experimenting with countless projects. Some make it as open source to Github. Many more just sit on my disk, never seeing daylight.
I had a certain bar for projects. Anything below felt unworthy of publishing. I would even sit on projects because I couldn’t come up with a clever name that I liked. I still learned and gained experience, but was missing that warm feeling, the sense of completion.
I remember an inspiring talk by Lu Wilson at Heart of Clojure 2024. Lu describes experiments as “scrappy fiddles” and encourages sharing work even when it’s unpolished, incomplete, or imperfect.
The main message is to “Normalize sharing scrappy fiddles” as this approach fosters community, creates opportunities, and makes everything better.
Publishing unpolished projects makes me uncomfortable. To overcome the resistance, I think it could help to set clear expectations:
- Name - using
fiddle-orscrappy-prefix with a placeholder name.
If the project matures and passes the threshold, the repo can be renamed later. - Status - clearly mark it as work in progress 🚧 Scrappy Fiddle 🚧 not to be relied upon.
- README - write a short note about motivation, aim, or goal, even when incomplete.
Writing is hard, but gets easier with practice.
This post itself is a scrappy fiddle.
I’ve been sitting on a draft of this post for a while. I was planning to describe motivations, reasons for not publishing, and points from the talk in more detail. And I ended up slipping into the old behavior. Going against the spirit of scrappy fiddles.
So I scrapped it and wrote just the essentials.