What's a Digital Garden and why do I have one? Well, I stumbled upon an article that discussed "Learning in Public" and how to use a Digital Garden to cultivate learning over time.
Question: So, what's the actual purpose of this project?
Answer: To put it simply and at risk of sounding lame, this site serves as my digital garden/tertiary brain. I understand that likely doesn't help much, so I'll try and explain in further detail below.
To expand on that, my personal goal with this DG is two-fold:
- Serve as a landing page of sorts that contains all of my informative/valuable bits of information.
- This would be a combination of the tertiary brain and digital garden that I mentioned above.
- As I learn new things or relearn old things I've since forgotten, I'll add them here in a TIL, find, or something else I've not yet decided 😅
- Ultimately, this makes it possible to do things like pull up the syntax of a command I used in the past.
- Serve as a location where I can "learn in public."
- Learning in public is something I stumbled upon recently that clicks with me, so I want to do it more.
- To help understand what learning in public is, consider the following scenario:
You're trying to learn how to create a website in React, so you use the create-react-app tool and build out a sample project.
Once you finish the sample project, you either leave it on your PC or push it to a private repo and only ever look at it when you try and build a site with React again.
At that point, you have to try and dig up the old project and hope it's not been so long that it's completely outdated.
Now, take the above scenario and imagine you're doing it with the plan to "learn in public." Once you get to building the demo, you would make an effort to perform small commits that follow the conventional commits specification.
Once you get the demo app working and in a good enough state that you'd be willing to show it to someone, you push the code to a public repository with your GitHub account. You add some extra files such as the
CONTRIBUTING.mdand some issue templates if someone manages to find a bug.
One day I was browsing dev.to for stuff to read when I came across an article by Josh Branchaud called "The Digital Garden". This sent me down a rabbit hole of sorts that exposed me to not just the concept of a Digital Garden, maintaining an investment mindset, learning in public, and a few other things. Because of this rabbit hole, I have created this site and intend on growing it over a long period of time.
That said, the simplest way I can think of to describe this project is it serves as a collection of my "public knowledge," which consists of just about everything I learn. I'm just starting this repository out, so as of writing this, I only have a couple of TILs and some cheatsheets I've collected over the years.
The actual website is hosted here by Vercel. At some point, I'll likely convert it so it runs on GitHub Pages instead since that's what I use for my other SSG sites.