Every project starts with an idea and a blank screen. This one started with an extra question: what if I documented the entire thing, including the parts where I have no idea what I'm doing?
Spoiler: it's mostly those parts.
The Case for Building in Public
Most development happens behind closed doors. Teams follow internal playbooks, ship products, and rarely share the messy middle. But the messy middle is where the actual learning happens, not the polished launch post.
Building in public means:
- Showing the process, not just the result. Every decision, pivot, and mistake gets documented.
- Creating accountability. When you say you'll follow a structured process, the internet holds you to it.
- Helping others. Solo devs and small teams rarely get to see how studio-grade processes actually work at indie scale.
It also means committing to the uncomfortable reality that sometimes I'll make the wrong call and it'll be in writing. Forever. On a website I built myself. Cool.
Why a Playbook?
After years at studios like EA, Blizzard, and LEGO, I noticed a pattern: the best teams follow a repeatable process. Not because they lack creativity, but because structure enables creativity. You don't reinvent project management every time you start a new game.
The problem? Those processes assume teams of 50+. Dedicated PMs, designers, QA leads, DevOps engineers. When you're building solo, you don't have that. You have a laptop, some Diet Mountain Dew, and stubbornness.
The Dev Playbook adapts studio methodology for solo-dev scale. Same rigor, fewer meetings. Dramatically fewer meetings, actually. Zero meetings. It's the dream.
Phase 0: Concept
The Playbook's first phase is about clarity before commitment. Before writing a single line of code, I answer:
- What am I building?
- Why does it need to exist?
- Who is it for?
- Is it feasible with my skills and timeline?
For The Dev Playbook site, this meant working through:
- A vision statement defining the site's purpose
- Discovery questions to pressure-test the idea
- Competitive analysis to see what's already out there (a lot of dev blogs, not many build-in-public methodology sites)
- Technical feasibility assessment for the chosen stack
- A concept document tying it all together into a Go/No-Go decision
The whole thing took a day. That's it. A day of structured thinking before months of building.
What's Next
With Phase 0 complete, I'm moving into Phase 1: Pre-Production: requirements, architecture, UI/UX design, and dev environment setup. The part where ideas become plans and plans become things I'll inevitably deviate from.
// The whole site starts here
export default {
name: "The Dev Playbook",
phase: 0,
status: "Concept Complete ✓",
};