On July 13, 2010, I uploaded a six-second clip to YouTube with the title “Corey Haines tells you what he thinks of shoddy testing.”
It was a casual, spontaneous moment. Corey was laughing and riffing about a scene from Twilight, while Noel Rappin held up a concrete pillar in the background. We were right in the thick of the early Chicago software craftsmanship community and the founding days of Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (SCMC). The clip had zero production value, no intro bumper, and no grand distribution strategy. It was just friends in a room who cared about craft, poking fun at bad tests.
That was more than sixteen years ago. Nearly six thousand days have passed since that upload, and the video has lived quietly in the YouTube archive ever since.
Sometimes, when enough years slip past, memory plays tricks on you. You start to doubt your own history. You wonder if you were just a ghost standing in the hallway, looking in through a crack in the door.
The archive is proof. The recordings are proof. I was really there. I was really part of it. I still am.
When I look back across those sixteen years, I see a long parade of project titles, show names, and channel banners: UGtastic, WHOIS Tech Community, organizational wrappers, and production pseudonyms.
If I am honest about why I created so many different containers, the truth is simple: for years, putting myself directly forward felt too exposed.
As someone who is AuDHD, putting my face, my natural speaking rhythm, and my real presence directly into public view felt intensely vulnerable. I felt weird. I worried about how my voice sounded, how my thoughts wandered, and how my mannerisms came across. Hiding behind an umbrella brand or a community banner felt much safer. It was a protective buffer. If people disliked the project, at least they were not rejecting me directly.
That buffer served a purpose for a while, but it also became a cage.
Right now, that migration is actively underway. I am consolidating all of those scattered efforts and historical archives under one open, permanent roof at just3ws.com.
The old handle reservation on my secondary account has been released, YouTube’s fourteen-day hold timer is counting down toward the Day 15 claim window, and my site, Patreon, banners, and local systems are aligning under that single name.
It sounds like routine administrative hygiene, but emotionally, it is a major pivot. I am grateful to have reached a point where I no longer feel the need to duck behind an organizational shield. I am looking forward to an evolution of my own voice and presence: not hiding in the shadows of a project label, but growing in public without shame.
Stepping out from behind the shield brings its own fear. There is always the obvious worry about negative comments or internet hostility, but that has never been the hardest part. The harder fear is apathy. It is that quiet, insidious doubt that tells you nobody cares, that your perspective does not matter, and that your work will simply disappear into an empty digital void.
For a long time, that fear was loud enough to drown out reality.
I do not believe the apathy lie anymore. When I pause and look around honestly, too many friends, mentors, family members, and peers have offered real encouragement, warmth, and faith in my work. The fear used to drown their voices out. Today, I am choosing to listen to them instead.
A friend recently reminded me of the classic piece of advice: “Do it scared.”
If you have ever stood on a skateboard at the coping of a deep concrete bowl or a vert ramp, you know that feeling in your marrow. You place the tail of your board on the steel pipe. Your back foot is perched on the kicktail, your front foot hovers over the front truck bolts, and you look straight down into the flat bottom.
Your stomach drops. Your pulse pounds in your ears. Your survival instincts scream at you to step back onto the safety of the deck.
If you wait on that platform until the fear disappears, you will stand there until the sun sets. The fear does not leave while you are standing on the edge.
The only way down the transition is to do it scared. You bend your knees, press your front wheels firmly into the wall, lean your entire upper body out over the drop, and commit your weight to the concrete. You let gravity do its job.
The migration is moving. The hold is counting down. The coping is behind me.
I am leaning in.