GitHub
Git
Anyone can say they can build. A portfolio of screenshots proves nothing — screenshots don’t compile, don’t deploy, and don’t break at 2am.
So we stopped saying it. We ship our own projects out in the open instead.
OpenEdu. TerraPlayer. The website you’re reading right now. All of it built where anyone can watch — the commits, the rough drafts, the bugs we fixed in public, the decisions we got wrong and reversed. That’s not a marketing stunt. It’s how we’d rather work, and it’s the closest thing we have to an honest résumé.
Claims of skill versus proof of skill
The web is full of agencies with beautiful case-study pages and nothing underneath them. You can’t tell, from the outside, whether the polished mockup represents real shipped work or a designer’s afternoon in Figma.
Building in public removes the ambiguity. When the code is open and the project is live, there’s no gap between what we claim and what exists. You don’t have to trust the pitch — you can go read the source.
That’s a different kind of credibility. It can’t be bought, faked, or borrowed from a stock-photo team page. Either the thing works or it doesn’t, and you can check.
A live repo is a stronger reference than any testimonial. Testimonials are words about us. The repo is the work itself.
It keeps us honest
A public commit history is a record you can’t edit after the fact. Every shortcut, every messy first pass, every “we’ll fix that later” is sitting there with a timestamp.
That changes how you work. You don’t ship the lazy version when you know it’s going to live somewhere permanent and visible. The standard goes up on its own — not because someone’s enforcing it, but because the whole thing is accountable by default.
It also kills a specific kind of self-deception. It’s easy to tell yourself a feature is “basically done.” It’s harder when the issue is still open and anyone can see it hasn’t moved in three weeks.
The learning loop gets faster
Closed work has a slow feedback loop. You build, you guess, you ship, and maybe you hear something back eventually.
Open work tightens that loop hard. People find your edge cases. They tell you when a decision was wrong. They suggest the approach you didn’t think of. We’ve shipped better versions of our own tools because someone we’d never met pointed at a line of code and said “this breaks if the input is empty.”
You can’t get that signal from a private repo. The work has to be visible for anyone to react to it — and reactions are how you get better, faster than you would alone.
Where the line is — and why it’s a feature
Here’s the part that matters most, said plainly:
Our personal projects live in public. Client work never does.
It isn’t a hedge we add for comfort. It’s a hard rule that draws a clean line.
When we build something for ourselves — OpenEdu, TerraPlayer, this site — the whole process is fair game. Open repos, public progress, write-ups when we learn something. That’s the labs side of the house, and it’s deliberately loud.
When we build something for a client, none of that applies. Client work is private and confidential, full stop. We don’t publish their code, name them, screenshot their dashboard, or turn their project into a case study without explicit permission. Your business is yours. Your data is yours. The work we do for you doesn’t become content for us.
People sometimes assume those two things contradict each other — that a company “building in public” must be loose with privacy. It’s the opposite. The reason we can be so open with our own projects is that we keep a hard wall around everyone else’s.
| Personal projects | Client work | |
|---|---|---|
| Code | Open, public repos | Private, confidential |
| Progress | Shared as we go | Never published |
| Naming | We talk about it freely | Clients stay invisible |
| Purpose | Proof, learning, trust | Solve your problem, quietly |
Building in public is how we sharpen our skills and show our work. Keeping client work private is how we earn the kind of trust that lets a business hand us the keys. Same company, two different jobs, and neither one bleeds into the other.
What you actually get from this
When you hire us, you’re not getting a team that’s good at writing proposals. You’re getting one whose work is already on the table, runnable, in the open, for you to inspect before you ever sign anything.
You can look at TerraPlayer and OpenEdu and judge the craftsmanship yourself. Then you get the exact opposite treatment for your own project — quiet, private, confidential, done right and kept between us.
That’s the trade we like. We prove the skill in the open. We do the work behind a closed door.
Want to see what we build when nobody’s paying us to? Take a look around the labs — the code’s right there, and so are the mistakes we made getting it to work.