--- title: "Coming Out of My sshell - George Rios" description: "After years of quietly building behind closed doors, I'm stepping into the open. Building in public, shipping ideas, connecting with communities, and enabling .NET developers to create." url: https://georgerios.com/articles/coming-out-of-my-sshell author: George Rios --- [ All articles](https://georgerios.com/articles) Reflections # Coming Out of My sshell After years of quietly building behind closed doors, I'm stepping into the open. Shipping ideas, writing about them, and connecting with communities of people who actually build things. Published 2026-03-01 Reading time 4 min Topic Reflections Author George Rios ![Hands typing on a laptop with terminal data on screen in a dark room](https://images.pexels.com/photos/5935787/pexels-photo-5935787.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&w=1260&h=750&dpr=1) Photo by [Sora Shimazaki](https://www.pexels.com/@sora-shimazaki/) on [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/crop-hacker-typing-on-laptop-with-information-on-screen-5935787/) For most of my career, I've operated the same way: head down, terminal open, shipping code behind NDAs and closed Slack channels. The work spoke for itself--to the people who could see it. Which, by definition, was almost nobody. I was comfortable there. Safe. The shell was warm. You write good code, the client is happy, the invoices get paid, repeat. There's nothing wrong with that life. I'm proud of the systems I've built and the teams I've worked with. But at some point you realize that comfort and growth are rarely in the same room. So I'm coming out of my shell. Literally and figuratively. ## The Quiet Years I've been building software professionally for over two decades. Enterprise systems, cloud migrations, platform architecture--the kind of work that keeps businesses running but doesn't make the front page of Hacker News. And that was fine. I wasn't looking for attention. I was looking to solve problems and get paid for it. But here's what I didn't account for: the compounding cost of silence. Every hard lesson I learned, every architecture decision I agonized over, every production incident I survived at 2 AM--all of it stayed locked in my head or buried in private repos. The knowledge was there. The experience was there. But nobody benefited from it except my next client. I watched other developers share openly--their wins, their failures, their half-baked ideas--and build communities around that honesty. I told myself I'd do that eventually. "Eventually" lasted about fifteen years. ## What Changed Honestly? I started building things I needed and couldn't find. Tools for my own workflow. Libraries that solved problems I kept running into. Infrastructure patterns I was tired of rebuilding from scratch for every new engagement. And once I started building for myself, a different instinct kicked in: _other people probably need this too._ That thought changes everything. When you're building for a client, the goal is delivery. When you're building for a community, the goal is enablement. You think differently about APIs, about documentation, about developer experience. You start asking "would this make sense to someone who isn't me?" instead of "does this pass the acceptance criteria?" And then you start shipping in the open. And then you start writing about it. And then you realize you probably should have been doing this the whole time. ## Building in Public, For Real This Time I'm not talking about tweeting screenshots of my terminal. I mean actually putting work in front of people before it's polished, before the marketing site is perfect, before I've triple-checked every edge case. Shipping the thing, getting feedback, iterating. The way software is supposed to work but rarely does when you're hiding behind a client contract. [nugx.org](https://nugx.org) shipped yesterday. A brand new NuGet front-end for the .NET community. Better search, better discovery, a UI that doesn't feel like it was designed in 2012\. Is it perfect? No. But it's real, it's live, and people are using it. The feedback has been genuinely encouraging--developers reaching out to say they've wanted something like this for years. That kind of response hits different when you've been building in private for so long. And [Noundry](https://noundry.com) is coming in days. The first public iteration of the developer toolkit I've been building and dogfooding across every project. The same libraries and infrastructure that power nugx.org, packaged up and ready for other .NET developers to use. I'm not just sharing my code--I'm trying to give other builders a head start. ## Enabling Builders This is the part that actually excites me. I've spent years accumulating opinions about how .NET applications should be built--data access, API scaffolding, AI orchestration, serialization, observability. All of that experience is now shipping as actual tools that other developers can use. The .NET community has incredible talent. What it doesn't always have is the ecosystem energy that pushes developers to try new things, share openly, and build tools for each other. The npm ecosystem has it. The Rust community has it. Python has it in spades. I want to see more of that energy in .NET. If even one developer uses something I've built to ship their idea faster, that's worth more than another year of quiet consulting. I mean that. ## Connecting The other thing that changes when you step out of the shell: you find your people. Builders who think the same way, who are solving adjacent problems, who actually care about craft. I've connected with more fellow developers in the last few months than in the previous five years combined. Communities of people who ship things, not just talk about shipping things. Turns out that when you put your work out there, people show up. They have opinions. They have ideas. They tell you what's broken and what they wish existed. That dialogue is more valuable than any sprint retrospective I've ever sat through. ## What's Ahead I'm excited. I don't say that often, because I'm usually the guy who under-promises and over-delivers. But right now, genuinely--I'm excited about what's coming. - **Noundry launches in days.** The first public release of the toolkit. Data access, API scaffolding, AI SDK, serialization--all of it. - **nugx.org is live and evolving.** The feedback has been great, and the roadmap is filling up with community-driven ideas. - **More writing.** More articles like this one. Architecture deep dives, build logs, honest takes on the .NET ecosystem and where it's heading. - **More connecting.** If you're building in the .NET space, I want to know about it. Seriously. I've spent a long time in the shell. It was productive. It was comfortable. But the best things I've ever built happened when I stopped optimizing for safety and started optimizing for impact. The terminal is still open. I'm just not hiding behind it anymore. _I'm building developer tools for the .NET ecosystem and writing about the journey. If you're a builder, a creator, or just someone who thinks C# deserves better tooling--I'd love to hear from you. [Get in touch](mailto:george@georgerios.com), or follow along as we ship Noundry and keep improving [nugx.org](https://nugx.org)._ ## References [ Back to articles](https://georgerios.com/articles) [Book a call ](https://cal.com/georgerios/30min) --- Contact: george@georgerios.com · Book a call: https://cal.com/georgerios/30min · Services summary for agents: https://georgerios.com/llms.txt