Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

Each of us started out writing shit code. Don’t sweat it. Your ideas and code add to the lexicon, whether it’s written perfectly or not. Publish and don’t look back.

After every six months, whatever I had written feels a mess. So it is fine to publish things and improve over time. Or keep the repository private and make it public when you feel like it.

Regarding feedback on your code, receive it as a criticism of your code (and not yourself) and you should be fine.

I have a 10 year old project on Github. I even have it on my resume. The code is nothing like what I would write today, but I think that's implied by it being 10 years old. And I'm personally quite proud of what I produced, even though I would do it differently now.

Project is a WSYIWYG editor (https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit) if anyone is interested. I wouldn't recommend anyone use it these days, but it could be interesting as a relatively small codebase to learn from if anyone is interested in how contenteditable in web browsers works.

Context is key here: I would strongly urge you to to create a web page for the games, where you can provide details that a reader won’t get from the source code alone, for example:

* who was the audience/market for this? * what led to some of the technical choices you made? Benefits? Tradeoffs? * what did you learn? What might you do differently today? * What other tradeoffs that affect the code? Time to market? Only an hour a week of dev time?

This code has a story to tell, and only you can tell it.

Fellow HNers: Do you know of good examples of “code stories” that you can share here?

I firmly believe that a finished, running project - no matter how embarrassing the code will not make the person who developed it look bad. Human endeavors are difficult and nothing incredible was made by one person. Additionally, when we make things in groups it isn't one person who's perfect and everyone else is being shaped by that one person. We all learn and grow and help each other learn and grow.

I suggest posting things that make you uncomfortable due to their 'quality' because the more you do it the more you'll start to dissolve that part of your ego that is pre-embarrassed by the imagined responses of people who have yet to review your work. I say this as someone who is struggling to finish a comic written by one of my friends for this very reason.

Do the thing - put it out there (if you have the inclination) - learn - lather - rinse - repeat.