
Have you considered exposing yourself? - lskillen
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/1128d2aca8
======
lskillen
Cross-post from Indie Hackers:

No, not like that! I'm talking about that visceral feeling of getting yourself
out there, of being vulnerable and outside of your comfort zone, in person or
in front of a camera. Just you, the real you, and the tides of the Internet;
dropping Internet cliches of pseudonyms, handles, cat GIFs and avatars. You do
this to promote yourself, your product or some part of the ecosystem that you
dedicate your life to.

For this I recently took part in a live stream (as in, a real-time broadcast,
gulp) chat/interview with Darko Fabijan, co-founder of Semaphore CI
([https://semaphoreci.com](https://semaphoreci.com)), as part of their
Semaphore Uncut series where they discuss IndieHackers favourite topic(s): the
problems that we face as software industry professionals, how we're solving
them, and what we're working on that excites.

For our session, we chatted about our experiences and passions as founders,
about building Enterprise-class SaaS products, about how package management
(the domain of Cloudsmith, [https://cloudsmith.io](https://cloudsmith.io))
integrates with CI/CD, and what's coming up next for both of us - You can
watch it the full thing here (with a podcast to follow):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHLy0IV4Yq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHLy0IV4Yq8)

It was a pleasure chatting with Darko, although it was my first experience
doing a live stream. Darko was obviously a lot more practiced, calm and
measured than I was; he was fantastic and I can only thank him for directing
the conversation smoothly. Having watched it back I think I managed to just
about get away with it externally, but internally I'm a maelstrom of nerves.
Certainly my domain is at a keyboard and not as a natural orator, but we all
know here that practice makes perfect.

Apart from one or two brain blips, it went well; I didn't articulate about
package management patterns and advice in the way that I would have liked. We
had a followup conversation that was much smoother, as is typical, and I'm
hoping to add some of that to the podcast. As is typical for anything that's
live, we also had a bit of meltdown pre-stream with the streaming software and
Skype, which both decided to crash just as we started to broadcast. Maybe
they'll release an "off-cuts" series of bloopers in the future.

Overall though, great fun and extremely worthwhile; I would definitely
recommend it as a soapbox. If not for your product, then for you personally.
Do it to better yourself. Do it to grow. Do it because you can do it. Although
I'm well-versed with talking to customers and doing demos, these are
targetted/pointed "scenarios" that play out similarly each time. This though,
this pushed me to the edge of my abilities. Would I do it again? Absolutely,
and I will. Watch this space.

So Hacker News, my actual question is:

What have you done recently where you exposed the real you?

Did it work? Tell us more, and give us a link (if you can). Be polite. :-)

