The Power of Homebrews

🛠️ About this series: This is the first post in a three-part series about the different modes of working: for yourself, in private, and in public. Each mode offers its own strengths: one helps you explore freely, another helps you finish, and the last helps you connect. They’re not stages, nor opposites. Just tools—and learning when to use which is part of any creative life.

Other posts in the series:

• The Power of Working in Private
• The Power of Working in Public—coming soon

There’s a certain kind of project I like to call a homebrew. The term comes from the world of homemade things—chiefly brewing your own beer of course, but in similar vein, you might be fermenting your own pickles, or aging your own cheese. You don’t do these things to impress the world or start a business. You do them because it’s satisfying to make something with your own hands, something to your own taste.

That same spirit applies to personal projects: a drawing, a tool, a little experiment that exists simply because you wanted it to. It may be unpolished, unscalable, even unfinished. But it’s yours—and that makes it better.

Why homebrews matter

In a time where every project is a potential startup and every sketch a potential Instagram post, the homebrew offers a quiet rebellion: make things that don’t have to scale, sell, or shine. Just solve the problem.

The pressure to be polished can kill creativity. When you’re thinking about how something will look to others, you often stop short of figuring out what it should be. You reach for aesthetics before function, engagement before content. Homebrews remove that pressure. They bring back play, messiness, and exploration.

Drawings nobody needs to like

One of my personal examples is drawing. I draw occasionally and share the results with friends if I see fit. There’s no pressure to be “good”, no performance metric. The point isn’t to get better at drawing or grow an audience—it’s to express something, mark a moment, or amuse someone I care about.

That tiny shift—doing something for someone specific or even just for yourself rather than for everyone—makes a world of difference. It lowers the stakes and makes room for joy.

A weight tracker made just for me

A few years ago, I built a small weight tracker app to scratch a personal itch. I didn’t like the way most apps aggressively pushed weight loss goals or offered graphs that fluctuated wildly day to day. So I made something quieter: an app that used a 30-day rolling average, smoothed out the noise, and didn’t try to tell me what to do. It didn’t judge; it just showed the trend.

I never published it (other than providing the source code on GitHub for the super-curious). It still lives on my phone and works just for me. And that’s the point—it solves my problem. If I had wanted to release it publicly, I’d have had to generalize the design, clean up the interface, write help pages, maybe even add onboarding, and worst of all, jump through the hoops of Google’s and Apple’s locked-down Stores. But as a homebrew, it got to stay weird and specific.

And every time I open it, I feel a quiet kind of pride—not because it’s perfect, but because it’s mine.

You don’t have to publish everything

Some things are better left unpublished. Not because they’re bad, but because publishing would change them. Once you share something publicly, expectations shift. You begin thinking about likes, reach, usefulness. You begin editing your instincts.

By keeping some projects as homebrews—shared only with a trusted few or even kept to yourself—you protect the original intent. You allow yourself to build weird things, half-finished things, unscalable things. And those are often where your best ideas start.

Homebrews remind us that creativity doesn’t always need a spotlight. Sometimes, the joy of building something just for yourself is enough. They’re a place to experiment, play, and reconnect with why you started making things in the first place.

Key points

• Homebrews are projects that serve you first, not an audience
• They remove pressure to perform, helping creativity flow
• Sharing with a small, trusted circle can be more fulfilling than public exposure
• Not every project needs to scale, monetize, or impress

Next post in the series: The Power of Working in Private—on the value of closing the door, tuning out the world, and focusing deeply enough to finish something that matters.