I've been building in secret for years. That ends today.

I shipped something this week that scared me more than any production deploy I've done at work.

It wasn't a database migration or a zero-downtime rollout or anything technical like that — it was an email sequence. On my own site. With my own name on it. For people I don't know yet, asking them to trust me with their inbox.

SSOOOOO... that's where we are. Issue one. Here we go.

I've been an engineer for years now and I don't talk about it publicly — not really. I post sometimes, I share stuff here and there, but the actual work? The actual "I'm sitting here at 1:22am holding on for dear life while my kids are asleep trying to figure out why my hooks aren't working" stuff? That I've kept to myself.

And I think I kept it to myself because I thought I wasn't ready. Like there was some invisible threshold I hadn't crossed yet. Some point where I'd know enough, ship enough, have enough saved, be enough — and then I could start showing people what I was doing. Right like I was waiting for permission that was never coming.

Here's what I figured out this week...that threshold doesn't exist. I made it up.

I made it up because being visible is scary, and "I'm not ready yet" is a cleaner story than "I'm scared people are going to watch me fail." Both of those are true but only one of them was actually holding me back.

So this week I launched Build con Chispa. It's a free community on Skool for people like us (como nosotros) people who have a full time job, real responsibilities, maybe a couple of kids or a parent to take care of, and still have this thing in them that won't leave them alone. The "I want to build something that's mine" thing. I set up the email capture on yessieperez.com. I wrote a drip sequence. I pressed send on stuff that had my actual thoughts in it, not the cleaned-up version.

And I'm going to keep doing that, out loud, in this newsletter, in the community, in the videos — because building in public isn't about performing vulnerability or turning your failures into content. It's accountability. When other people can see what you're doing, you don't quit at the first hard thing. You keep going because you said you would.

That's the part nobody explains right — the audience isn't just for them, it's for you.

For people like us, where time is the one thing we cannot manufacture more of, building in public also forces you to be specific about what you're actually doing. You can't vague-post your way through a sprint if you've been saying "I'm working on an app" for six months with nothing to show. You have to ship something real: a screenshot, a link, a bug you fixed, something you can point to, right. That specificity is what actually moves projects forward.

So if you've been building in secret, if you've got a project sitting in a private repo or a Notion doc you've never shown anyone — I'm not going to tell you to go post it on Twitter right now. I'm going to tell you to tell one person. Send me a reply to this email and tell me what you're building. That's it. One person.

That's how it starts.

The TWO tools that made this week actually happen is VS Code and Claude Code.

I know there are a hundred AI code editors and everyone has a take and people are very loud about it but here's what I can tell you from actually using it: it lets me move at night. I'm not starting from a blank file, I'm not googling syntax at midnight, I'm not losing the thread of what I was building when I had to put it down because somebody needed water or had a nightmare. I pick it back up and I know where I am right like I never left.

It's not magic, you still have to understand what you're building. If you don't, you'll accept AI slop and wonder why your app breaks in prod. But if you DO know what you're doing, Claude code is like having a second set of hands that doesn't need sleep. For the kind of building we're doing... real work in stolen hours... that's not a small thing.

Start with the free tier. See if it changes how you work at night. It changed mine.

Reply to this email and tell me what you're building — doesn't matter how small, doesn't matter if it's still just an idea in a Notes app, I want to know.

And if you want to build alongside other people doing the same thing, come find us: skool.com/build-con-chispa-9733 — free, no pitch, just builders.

Yesenia M. Perez Lead Backend Engineer. Mom of 3. Building when I can.

yessieperez.com | IG @yeseniavperez | TikTok @iamyessieperez | LinkedIn /yessiemalone