Building in Public at 20: The Real Version

I am twenty years old, a junior at UNC Charlotte, and I have built and shipped around eight real products in the last two years.

Not side projects sitting in a private GitHub repository. Real things with real domains, real users, and real decisions behind them. Propify. CrownCode AI. Higgins Digital. A full-stack photography portfolio for a client. The HBG construction website that went from a 47 to a 98 Lighthouse score. The Phi Delta Theta chaplain platform. An AI workflow system. This site.

I am not listing those to be impressive. I am listing them because the number matters for what comes next.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Every single one of those builds had a phase where nothing worked and I had no idea why.

The Propify CORS issue took days to diagnose. The HBG website had dependency version mismatches from my first Claude Code attempt that required starting the project over. Higgins Digital's email routing failed after launch because of Resend domain verification that was not mentioned anywhere obvious in the documentation. CrownCode's streaming implementation broke the output encoding twice before I got it right.

Building in public means the finished products are public. The three days at one in the morning before the finished product exists are usually not. I am trying to be more honest about that because the failure phase is where most of the real learning happens, and pretending it does not exist makes the whole process look easier than it is. That does not serve anyone.

Why I Build This Much

I want to be honest about this because I think it matters more than the technical content.

Building real things is one of the most stabilizing things I know how to do. When things feel uncertain or heavy, shipping something real is proof that I can figure things out. That I can start from nothing and end with something that works. That matters to me beyond the career value of the output.

That might sound like a coping mechanism. I think it is one, and I think that is fine.

On Faith

I am a Christian. Philippians 4:13 is in the footer of every site I build, not as decoration but because it is what I come back to at one in the morning when a project feels impossible and I do not have another logical reason to keep going. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. That is not a productivity framework. It is a foundation.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out

Do not wait until you are ready. You are not going to be ready. Readiness is something you develop by doing the thing before you feel prepared.

Every project you ship teaches you things that no class or tutorial can. Your work is the credential. Put it in public. Build things that help people. Be honest about what worked and what did not.

The gap between people who talk about building and people who actually build is execution. That is it. Start. Break things. Figure it out. Repeat.