Just Release

A couple of months ago, at the first VibeRacing, the exercise was to build a Hacker News crawler to discover which AI model had the most hype in the community that week. I was left with the itch of having given the prompt but not having participated. At the RbR in Bogotá, I finally decided to build my own version.

My spec was a bit different: I only cared about capturing what appeared on the front page, not all the news. I wanted to use Hacker News data and leverage its community as the best internet filter for startups and technology. What's on Weaving News today takes the front page news every 15 minutes, gets the article content and comments, and after gathering around 90 news items per day, generates a newsletter with the most relevant ones to send to subscribers.

The second goal was to test Forge&Hive, a tool I'm creating that allows developing tasks locally and when they're ready, deploying to AWS Lambda to run as cron jobs. I wanted to create something without the pressure of the perfect product, just for the pleasure of testing if F&H was ready to be shared with more people.

At the RbR in Bogotá, I managed to create the initial flow and leave the crawler running. When I returned, I shared what I had built with Sergio. When we organized the RbR in Guadalajara, we did a road trip from Mexico City and during the journey we talked about what we could build on top of that data. Sergio had the brilliant idea of giving it a tabloid look that completely transformed the project.

In Guadalajara, we managed to make the tabloid look exist while facilitating the event. I got hooked and decided to add email subscription and share it with the community the following week. First of all, I want to use this space to thank everyone who has tried Weaving News and given feedback. It has been incredibly enriching to share this project with you and see how the community suggests improvements and new features.

Today, reflecting on this journey, I realize that one of the initial goals was achieved—Weaving managed to make a Release and share it with the community, now it belongs to everyone. F&H is still very raw and it's very difficult for me to explain it, we'll have to keep working on it. More importantly, the process left me with invaluable lessons about what it really means to Release in our community.

The "Release" that's in the name of our events is the most fundamental part of everything we do in the 12 hours that an RbR lasts. As we explored in the Time to Magic blog post, today the time it takes to go from an idea to something shareable with the community has been drastically reduced. In the manifesto we express it by quoting Reid Hoffman: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched it too late" and Santiago's motto: "Done is better than perfect".

But Release doesn't simply mean uploading code to GitHub or deploying on Vercel. The real magic of Release consists of having a URL to share with friends and seeing how they interact with what you've created. It's that moment when your code stops being yours to become a shared experience.

The product will always lack features, there will always be something more to polish, another bug to solve. Release is the conscious act where the creator stops, breathes, and shares their creation with others. It's a moment of vulnerability and courage where we expose our work not because it's perfect, but because it's ready to receive feedback and nourish the project with everyone's experience.

We see it constantly at events. Like when four people end up at the same table creating Strava apps, each with their own vision, but all being perfect users to test each other's apps. Or when Davo, after talking with Lulo, transformed his code review tool by adding the characteristically brutal tone of Linus Torvalds, turning a technical utility into something memorable.

That remix of ideas, that spontaneous collaboration that emerges when we share, is the essence of Release. Sergio transformed my boring data collection into a visually attractive tabloid. Without that moment of sharing, Weaving News would be just another news aggregator.

At a Release before Ready event, take a few minutes when you finish a feature to ask for feedback from someone who could be a user of your app. Take a moment to try other people's products. This simple act of sharing and testing is what turns an RbR into a transformative experience. An experience where we give and receive feedback on the products we're creating and we all grow as a community.

Something that deeply fascinates me about RbR is the nature of our conversations. We talk about what we want to create, about the process we follow, about the tools that make our lives easier. We share productivity tricks, workflows we've discovered, shortcuts that save us time.

What's brilliantly absent in these talks is the eternal debate of "my language/framework is better than yours". At other tech events, it's common to fall into discussions about whether React is superior to Vue, whether Rust is the future and JavaScript must die, whether real programmers use Vim or Emacs. These conversations, while sometimes entertaining, rarely lead us to anything constructive.

At RbR, code is simply the means for features to exist. What matters is not whether you used Python or JavaScript, but what problem you solved. It doesn't matter if you deployed on AWS or Vercel, but that now there's a URL to share. It doesn't matter if you used an SQL or NoSQL database, but that the data persists and the app works.

This culture of curiosity about the "how" without judgment about the "with what" is liberating. At the same event we can learn how someone created a chatbot using n8n without writing code, how another built a complete app with Lovable, how a third implemented a distributed system in Rust, and how a fourth did scraping with Python. All these approaches are equally valid because they all result in something created and shared.

When the focus is on creating, each tool finds its natural place. We use what brings us closer to that magical moment of Release. For some it will be Cursor and "vibe coding", for others it will be meticulously writing every line in Neovim. Both paths are valid if they lead to sharing something with the community.

This open-mindedness about tools also allows us to learn exponentially more. Instead of defending our technological choices, we're curious about others' choices. "How did you manage to do that so quickly?", "What tool did you use for that animation?", "How do you handle state in your app?". Every question is an opportunity to add a new tool to our repertoire.

If creating digital products motivates you, if releasing imperfect but functional products excites you, if giving constructive feedback and receiving suggestions with curiosity is in your DNA, then Release before Ready is your community.

Next Saturday, October 18th we will meet again in Mexico City to continue building, sharing and learning together. This event will be special because it will kick off Mexico Tech Week (October 20-26), a full week where the city will vibrate with the energy of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Imagine starting Tech Week with something you created, with a URL to share, with fresh feedback from a community that understands the value of creating. Imagine arriving at the week's events not just as a spectator, but as someone who the previous weekend transformed an idea into reality.

In these months since we started RbR, we have seen the community grow not only in number but in the quality of connections, in the depth of feedback, in the ambition of projects. What began as an experiment of three people during Easter week is now a vibrant community where each event surpasses the previous one.

Come experience that reduced Time to Magic we talk about. Come feel the satisfaction of seeing someone use what you created that same morning. Come give and receive feedback that will transform not only your project, but your way of seeing technological creation.

It doesn't matter if you're an experienced developer or taking your first steps. It doesn't matter if you have a clear idea or arrive seeking inspiration. The only thing that matters is that you come with the desire to create and share.

We're waiting for you this October 18th to continue writing the story of Release before Ready together. Because at the end of the day, creating in community is not just more effective—it's exponentially more magical.