Rakshit Sharma — homeRAKSHIT_SHARMA
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General•2 min read•Published: 2026-07-18

The Art of Building in Public: A Developer's Journey

Building in public is one of the most rewarding things a developer can do. It's not just about sharing code — it's about sharing the process, the failures, and the small wins that no one else sees.

In this post, I want to walk you through why I started building in public and what I've learned along the way.

Why Build in Public?

When I shipped my first side project, I told no one. I pushed it to GitHub, sent it into the void, and waited. Nothing happened — because nobody knew it existed. Building in public changes that. Here's what it gave me:

  • Accountability — Sharing your progress makes you show up even when motivation dips.
  • Feedback early — Real people tell you what's confusing before you've over-engineered it.
  • Unexpected connections — The right tweet at the right time can land you a collaborator, a user, or a job.
  • A record of growth — Looking back at old posts is a reminder of how far you've come.

What I Shipped This Month

Here's a quick breakdown of what I worked on:

  1. Redesigned my portfolio — Cleaner layout, faster load times, and a proper blog section (you're reading it!).
  2. Launched a Notion-powered blog — Using the Notion API to serve posts directly from my workspace. No CMS overhead, just writing.
  3. Open-sourced a small utility — A Node.js script that converts Notion blocks to HTML. Check it out on GitHub →

How I Use Notion as a CMS

The setup is simpler than you'd think:

const { Client } = require('@notionhq/client');

const notion = new Client({ auth: process.env.NOTION_API_KEY });

async function getBlogPosts() {
  const response = await notion.databases.query({
    database_id: process.env.NOTION_DATABASE_ID,
    filter: {
      property: 'Published',
      checkbox: { equals: true },
    },
  });
  return response.results;
}

Each page in a Notion database becomes a blog post. Properties like Title, Slug, Published, and Tags map directly to your front-end.

Lessons Learned

"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great." A few things I'd tell myself at the beginning:

  • Done > perfect. Ship it, then improve it.
  • Consistency beats intensity. One post a week beats a binge followed by silence.
  • Your audience grows with you. The people who find you early are your best readers.

What's Next

I'm planning to:

  • Add a newsletter for people who want posts in their inbox
  • Write a deep-dive on building with the Notion API
  • Share the full source code for this portfolio If any of that sounds interesting, follow along — I'll be sharing everything here.

Thanks for reading. If you found this useful, share it with someone who's thinking about building in public. It might be the nudge they need. 🙌

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