Get your stuff out there

Last week I received two emails.

One was from a fan of my After Dark Screensavers project. He emailed to tell me that he had incorporated my code into a Google Chrome plugin. Now you can see flying toasters every time you open a new browser tab.

The other was from an arts museum in the Netherlands. They’re organizing an exhibition about screensavers, and were asking if they could use parts of my project as well.

When I was writing code for that project, there’s no way I would have thought that this little idea of mine would grow beyond me. That there would be this long tail of mashups and spin-offs? Absurd. I am a nobody, and it was just a dumb little thing.

That’s why it’s so important just to get your stuff out there. You don’t have to be a somebody to end up influencing a lot of people. And as Steve Jobs said, once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.