Nobody talks about the emotional side of shipping. Let's fix that.
There's a specific kind of silence that happens right after you deploy something real.
Not the silence of a bug you haven't found yet. Not the silence of waiting for the CI pipeline to clear. A different kind. The kind where you close your laptop, lean back, and just... sit with it.
If you've felt it, you know exactly what I mean.
If you haven't felt it yet, this article is for you.
It Doesn't Start With Excitement. It Starts With Dread.
Here's what nobody puts in their "I shipped a side project!" LinkedIn post:
The beginning is awful.
You open a blank index.html or a fresh one, and suddenly the weight of the idea feels crushing. You had a vision in your head. Fully formed. Beautiful. And then you look at a white screen with a blinking cursor, and the gap between what you imagined and what currently exists feels insurmountable.
This is the part people skip when they talk about building things. They show you the polished Figma mockup, the finished landing page, and the GitHub repo with 400 stars. They don't show you the three hours they spent just trying to decide on a folder structure.
The dread is real. The friction is real. And it's not a sign that you're doing it wrong — it's the price of entry for building something that actually matters to you.
The gap between your taste and your current ability is not a flaw in you. It's evidence that your taste is working.
This is a real thing. The people who never feel that gap are the people who don't have high standards for their own work.
The Middle: Where Most Things Go to Die
At some point in every project — usually around 40% of the way through — you will hate it.
Not mildly dislike it. Hate it. You'll look at what you've built and feel nothing but contempt. The colours feel wrong. The code feels messy. The whole concept suddenly seems embarrassing. You'll open Twitter, see someone ship something that looks better than yours, and quietly close your laptop.
This is the trough. Every creative person has a name for it:
- Writers call it the 'saggy middle'.
- Musicians call it 'demo-itis'.
- Filmmakers call it the 'rough cut that makes the director cry'.
For developers, it's the moment you seriously consider scrapping everything and starting over. Or worse — just abandoning the project entirely and telling yourself you'll "come back to it later".
You won't come back to it. We both know that.
The only way out of the trough is through it.
Not around it. Not by pivoting to a new idea. Not by starting fresh. Through. Keep pushing. Ship something. Iterate. The feeling on the other side is worth it in a way that's almost impossible to describe until you've experienced it.
The Moment the Thing Comes Alive
And then—if you survive the trough—something shifts.
It's usually small. An animation finally feels right. Two components click together in a way you didn't plan. You load it in the browser, and for the first time it looks like the thing you imagined at the beginning. Not exactly. Better.
This is the moment developers don't talk about enough. When the project stops being a problem you're solving and starts being a thing that exists in the world. When you catch yourself using your own app and forgetting that you built it.
I've spoken to dozens of developers about this moment, and the words they reach for are almost always the same:
"It felt real."
Not finished. Real. There's a difference. Finished is when all the tasks are done. Real is when it stops feeling like a side project and starts feeling like software.
What Shipping Actually Feels Like
Here's the emotional sequence — as honestly as I can write it:
T-minus 1 hour: Quiet panic. You're finding small things to fix that don't need fixing. You're re-reading your README for the fifth time. You're refreshing your deployment preview.
T-minus 10 minutes: Resignation. You've accepted that it's not perfect. That there are still edge cases you haven't handled. That the mobile nav is slightly off on the iPhone SE. You hit deploy anyway.
T-zero: A strange calm. The kind that comes after a decision is made and can't be unmade.
T-plus 5 minutes: You share it somewhere. A tweet. A Discord. Submitting to dev.to. And then you close the tab immediately because you can't watch.
T-plus 20 minutes: You open the tab. Someone liked it. Someone actually looked at the thing you made. And something in your chest does a thing that's hard to describe — it's not quite pride, not quite relief. It's closer to vindication. Proof that the idea wasn't just in your head.
T-plus a few days: You look at it again, and you can see every flaw clearly. But you don't feel ashamed of them. You feel like a person who made a real thing and learned real things in the process of making it.
That's it. That's what shipping feels like.
The Thing About Being Proud of Your Work
Pride is a complicated word in developer culture. We're trained to be humble. To say "it's just a side project" is to minimise it. To pre-emptively apologise for the code quality before anyone even looks at it.
But there's a version of pride that has nothing to do with arrogance. It's the quiet satisfaction of knowing that something exists because you made it exist. That a year ago it was nothing, and now it is something. That if you didn't build it, it simply wouldn't be there.
That's not arrogance. That's a craft.
The developers I respect most aren't the ones with the cleanest code or the most GitHub stars. They're the ones who finish things. Who ships things? Who look at what they've built and – even knowing all the shortcuts they took and all the technical debt they accumulated – feel something?
Because code without feeling is just syntax. It's the feeling that makes it worth building.
What I've Learned From Building Things I'm Proud Of
A few things that are actually true, earned from time in the trough:
Constraints make you more creative, not less. The projects I'm most proud of weren't the ones with unlimited scope. They were the ones where I had a weekend, a weird idea, and no time to second-guess myself.
The version you ship will always feel unfinished. Ship it anyway. "Done and public" beats "perfect and private" every single time.
Other people's opinions of your work are data, not verdicts. When someone loves what you built, it tells you something useful. When someone doesn't, it also tells you something useful. Neither defines whether you should keep building.
The pride compounds. The first thing you ship feels terrifying. The second feels hard. By the tenth, shipping is just something you do. The fear never fully goes away — but it gets smaller relative to the satisfaction.
Building something you're proud of changes how you see yourself. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet way. You start to think of yourself as someone who makes things. And that identity — builder, creator, maker — is one of the most useful identities a developer can carry.
A Question for You
What's the thing you've built that you're most proud of? Not the most technically impressive. Not the one with the most stars or the most users.
The one that made you feel something when you shipped it.
Drop it in the comments. I want to see what you've made.
If this resonated with you, follow along — I write about the craft and psychology of building things as a developer, not just the technical how-tos. Real talk, no fluff.
Top comments (25)
I am reach a strange state after Prude of, hard to define but I think that is some kind of certainty, even if no one sees what I do, I'm still clear about its values and flaws.
Before I feel burn out, I try a champinship cure method. I started working based on championship / hackhaton. That is a long and exciting process. I thought that if I won a competition, some kind of recognition would come with it, I was very wrong about that, but at least winning means a kind of recognition and some confirmation that what I'm doing is not completely unnecessary.
Finally thx for this community I found my real CV is simple: dev.to/pengeszikra
On my post I clear describe my stuffs and how I think. That is most informative compare to any CV.
My latest prude of is: mordor-project the underground file format
Peter you just wrote the paragraph I couldn't figure out how to end the article with.
That thing you described — being clear about the value and the flaws even when nobody's watching - I'm honestly not there yet. I still refresh the stats. I still need someone to notice before it feels real. You're describing a version of this I'm still working toward.
And the hackathon as a sanity check not a finish line... that reframing actually hit different.
Going to check out the mordor project now, underground file format already has me
I'm still far from that feeling, but even from day one the loop already started - refreshing GitHub, checking post stats, waiting for someone to notice 🫠
And I'm still at start poin, honestly overwhelmed by where to even begin and what to do next and why I need this
Maybe what I built isn't that impressive. But I think getting noticed is a completely separate kind of titanical work from building itself. And then maintaining, growing...there's probably no finish line. It'll keep surprising you, disappointing you, making you proud.
Kind of like raising a kids...I guess 🤔
This hit me. The refreshing-GitHub loop is so real - I've caught myself checking stats on something I shipped an hour ago like the numbers are going to be different if I look again
And you said something that actually stopped me - getting noticed is a completely separate kind of titanic work from building itself. That's genuinely one of the most accurate things I've read about this. Nobody tells you that part. You ship something you're proud of and then realize there's a whole other mountain.
The kid analogy is perfect too. You don't finish raising them 😅. You just keep showing up.
You're not behind. You're exactly where everyone who keeps going starts. The overwhelm you're feeling right now? That's not a sign to stop - that's just what day one of caring actually feels like
The "T-plus 20 minutes" part is accurate. I open
sourced a project this week after months of building
it alone and the first time someone reacted to it on
dev.to I just stared at the notification for a while.
But the part nobody writes about is what comes after
shipping. You close the laptop feeling proud and then
wake up the next day realizing the real work just
started. Building the thing was the part I was good
at. Getting anyone to look at it is a completely
different skill that I'm learning from zero.
The trough you described doesn't end at shipping. It
just changes shape. Instead of hating your code you
start hating your distribution strategy. Instead of
wondering if the architecture is right you're
wondering if anyone will ever care.
Still worth it though.
That last line carried the whole thing.
still worth it though — after everything you just described. That's not toxic positivity; that's just someone who's been through it and came out the other side still standing.
And you named something I didn't put in the article — the trough changes shape, but it doesn't end. You just get better at recognising it. The post-ship version hits different because you can't fix it with more code.
What's the project? genuinely asking.
It's called NOVAI. A Layer 1 blockchain I'm building
from scratch in Rust. The core idea is that AI entities
are protocol primitives instead of smart contracts. They
have their own keys, balance, and persistent memory
built directly into the chain.
65,000+ lines across 16 crates. Just went open source
this week. The building took months, the distribution
started 3 days ago and already feels harder.
github.com/0x-devc/NOVAI-node if you want to look.
Amazing article. It resonated with me a lot and I loved each and every word you have written. It was like you read my mind and wrote an article about it. Thank you sharing such awesome article in simplest way possible. Highly relatable especially the Github readme. I read my readme 5 10 times before publishing incase I missed any point.
Something I'm proud of. I have vibe coded a few small website and the proud moment is I actually made something closest to the idea. I shared it on platforms but didn't got a lot of attention but I loved making them and enjoyed every bit of making them. These are a few of them:
Konark the readme thing is so real. 😭
I just went through your projects — The Seven genuinely got me 😄. You picked a very specific vibe and actually stuck the landing. That's harder than it looks.
and you loved making them. that's the whole thing, honestly.
i know that silence. shipped a side project that 3 people use and that moment after deploy hit harder than anything shipped to thousands. something about the stakes being purely personal
three people who chose it because they actually wanted it. not because it was assigned or bundled or just there.
That's a completely different kind of proof.
What was the project?
an open-source PM tooling thing, built for myself first. basically the stack i wish existed for managing agents as a team. the 3 people who found it asked questions that rewrote half the architecture.
I remember building a cool search feature for a client’s website many years ago. It took ages and was really well built technically.
This was way before we had LLMs generating all our code. It was painstakingly hand-coded and well architected. The UX was great, the code was tidy and efficient, and it was built on Laravel - probably with jQuery, though I don’t actually remember the exact details now.
I just remember being really proud of it.
The annoying part is that the client used it for a year, then ditched it. That wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but what they moved to was so obviously rubbish that I still can’t understand it to this day.
It was quite a big corporation with plenty of internal politics, and I can’t help but feel my coding was a casualty of a bigger political shift in tech.
Oh well, I still enjoyed building it, and it was very tidy technically, even if it was underappreciated.
Tom, that's actually painful to read.
You built something genuinely good and watched it get binned for office politics. not because it was bad. because of a meeting you weren't in.
That still would bother me too, honestly. years later.
But you kept the part they couldn't vote away in some boardroom — you knew it was good. You still know it.
Hey Tombri! Great work on the article. Really well structured and it was easy for me to follow along! :)
One of the projects I am really proud of is a Godot game me and my friends made that we call it Purified. It was an ambitious game that was made during my undergrad capstone year and I collaborated with the Professor if I can do all the assignments early, so that I can focus on the final game project. I also asked if I could work with friends outside of my University, where I was able to get around more than 80+ collaborators (mostly testers my friend got from her job at a middle school). With this, I had a whole 4 months to work on this project, so I had the greatest advantage of all time.
With that said, it was one of the projects I am really proud of because of how hard we worked on it since it has an inventory system and such. We also have Voice Acting in it every time you read an NPC's dialogue. It was really ambitious to the point where everyone in my class were surprise at it and we were very proud of the accomplishment, especially on the last semester of undergrad.
I am debating on whether I should share it on dev.to. The reason is that it is not "polish" enough for me to be proud of releasing it on dev.to, but I think it's a good opportunity to share this since I came across your post lol.
With this result, me and my friend co-founded the "Sandboa Team", which is a bit inactive at the moment since we are busy with school. Someday, we might get back to it but not sure. Also not sure what the mission statement for our group is but the first thing in mind is a platform that allows us to showcase games. Maybe @konark_13 and @embernoglow if they are interested. The best case is creating the "Sandboa Team" group on Dev.to, but I already have the DEVenger org.
If you would like to see the trailer and the itch.io, here it is!
itch.io game: francisishere.itch.io/purified
Thanks again! Well done and great post!
Wow, such an amazing game. The Sandboa team should be proud of it. I would love to play it again and again and have fun playing it. You should be proud of yourself and your partners for making such an awesome game.
I would love to be a part of your team and help you in any way possible. I'm a big big game-o-holic. So, little bit of gaming, I can help test it and tell you about the games and the pull they are lacking. I love playing games on my Android and some stays and some get deleted.
How do you make money from it?
Thanks! We didn't make money from it since it's free to download. I was about to make a donation page since it makes sense, but haven't got around to that.
Do you have discord? If not, feel free to email me (still waiting on that lol).
"Not around it. Not by pivoting to a new idea. Not by starting fresh. Through. Keep pushing. Ship something. Iterate." - this one is a very profound advice, even if you're in mixed feelings about the thing you're building, just push it through, this is a breaking point you need to overcome at least once, so it will be easier in the future. But you also need to know your limits, because there's a mental side of all that and it can hit hard if you overestimate yourself.
You clearly described what I went through when first starting out. Earlier in my career transition to tech, when I only know vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I had this idea of creating an interactive tarot card reader inspired from freeCodeCamp's lab exercise. It reads a person's past, present, and future randomly.
It was an idea born from being frustrated of not having a site that does exactly that. So I decided to just build it myself. At first it was tough, had to scrape for an API for my card data and card images but ultimately I finished it in about one month with less than a year of experience.
After deploying, I honestly felt like it wasn't enough and it doesn't hold up to my standards. I just told myself that it is done and just let it be. There are multiple bugs when I tried to spam click cards, mobile responsiveness are jagged sometimes, but I just said at least I finished what I started.
However, as I create more projects, I still look back at this one and can't help myself to be proud of something that I wasn't sure I was going to deploy in the first place. Even though it has more bugs, it has a huge
index.js, and a wonky CSS, I'm still proud to call it mine.Today, this is my most starred and most consistently viewed and cloned repo. Now imagine if I discontinued this, I would have zero chance of sharing my idea to the world.
Live Link: veil-and-visions-fcc-jiro.netlify....
GitHub Repo: github.com/CodingWithJiro/freecode...
This ties back to meaning in work. When you understand the why behind what you’re building, the result feels different.
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.