You have a side project. It works. Nobody knows it exists.
The instinct is to launch harder: post it somewhere, hope it catches. That occasionally works and mostly does not, because a launch reaches people who have no reason to care about you yet.
The sequence that works is slower and more reliable.
1. Write before you launch
The most common ordering mistake is building in private and then launching.
At launch you have one post and no history. Someone interested checks your profile and finds nothing. There is no reason to follow, because there is no evidence you will keep going.
The alternative is writing about the work for weeks or months first. By launch day you have a body of posts, a small audience who watched it get built, and something for a stranger to read after they arrive.
The launch then lands on a foundation instead of on nothing.
2. Pick the problem, not the product
Post about the problem your project solves, not the project.
Nobody is looking for your product. Some people are looking for a solution to something. Posts about the problem find them. Posts about the product find people who already know you exist, which is a smaller group by orders of magnitude.
This also survives a pivot. Posts about the problem stay relevant if the product changes. Posts about the product do not.
3. Be specific enough to be findable
Generic content is invisible. There is too much of it and no reason to surface yours.
Specific content is findable, because it matches a specific search. "How to group git commits into coherent stories" is a thing someone might look for. "Tips for developer productivity" is not.
The instinct to broaden your topic to reach more people has it backwards. Narrower reaches fewer people and reaches the right ones.
4. Make the project visible in the work
Your project should appear in posts as context, not as a pitch.
While building Noomachy DevTracker I needed to group related commits, and the obvious approach turned out to break on real data.
The product is mentioned. Nobody is being sold to. Anyone curious can find it, and nobody feels pitched.
That ratio matters. Roughly one post in ten should be a direct pitch. The rest should mention the product only as the setting for something else.
5. Let people watch
The thing that converts casual readers into an audience is continuity. They saw the decision, then the implementation, then the thing that went wrong, then the fix.
That serial quality is what makes people follow rather than read once. A single excellent post gets read. A sequence gets followed.
6. Launch into the audience you built
Now the launch post goes to people who have context. They know what the problem is and why you built it, because they watched.
That post outperforms a cold launch by a large margin, and more importantly the people arriving already understand what they are looking at.
The honest timeline
This is months, not weeks. Three months of posting before a launch is not unusual and is not wasted.
The reason it feels slow is that the returns arrive late. A post today reaches your current audience, which is small. The same post in six months is part of what a visitor reads when deciding to follow.
Which is the thing worth internalising: you are not publishing, you are accumulating.