Wow cool idea! I've kind of already been doing something like this but posting little code snippets to my twitter account for later reference. I like the idea of creating a repo like the OP and not having to spam my followers with my random, crappy code! :~) Cheers!
Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
31–40 of 156 posts
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#32For me, this is all about tracking my personal learning. I reference old posts several times a week. I hope others can learn from it as well!
Really well done and nicely organized. Did you find yourself noticing the overhead of writing these after learning something new? Or did you write them as an afterthought later on? Did you pick certain things to include rather than others? Defiantly thinking about doing something similar to this sometime soon!!
I generally take about 5 minutes at some point each evening to write up something that I learned that day or earlier that week.
I've always viewed them as being quick and easy to write up which has taken away the intimidation that can come with trying to write a big blog post.
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#33Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I blame that I've been writing "SQL" all day and have unconsciously associated three letter non English words and "Is acronym". Hyperpedantically, "SQL" is an initialism, but not an acronym.
Only if you pronounce it "Ess-Kew-Ell" and not "Sequel", though, right?
Hmm, interesting. I think you are right.
(NASA is an acronym. NSA is an initialism.)
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#35I keep my org notes in a private repo, which I often edit directly on Github. I organize by topic. e.g. Cooking, Photoshop, Haskell, yoga, drawing, Go, Emacs, vim, etc. I use my two README.org to organize the information. One is for all topics and the second is a much smaller immediate README that I want to view daily. I keep it pruned since the main README has all the references.
I'd like to breakout topics of general interest but I feel that I'd need to be more organized. Last week, however, I did move my Ergonomic Notes (e.g. RSI, keyboards, mice, programming by voice) to a public repo.
https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes
I also find it helpful to group topics and create menus in the org files:
Menu: Ergonomic Keyboards | Ergonomic Mice | Programming by Voice | RSI
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#36This is great. As an extension, I was discussing with a friend a while ago how great Stackoverflow is at capturing the contents of expert's brains. Is there a way to achieve that on a broader scale without requiring the question-asking side of things? Say you're a lab scientist and you have a small trick or bit of informal insight, how could you be prompted in the right way to share it?
and also tagging it in such a way that it can be found. I have thought about this before too - would be a great supplement to something like wikipedia.
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#37Just wanted to say, this is an excellent idea and I'll be blatantly stealing it for myself from this point forward; thank you for putting this motivation in my head by your successful implementation. I've done a half-assed "important learnings from the last year" retrospective for myself, but your method of keeping it going forward is both far less lossy and more complete. Putting it on GIT as well seems like a smart…
Everyone at my company really got behind the idea of TILs too, so we created a little web app for it -- https://til.hashrocket.com/
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#38This is great. As an extension, I was discussing with a friend a while ago how great Stackoverflow is at capturing the contents of expert's brains. Is there a way to achieve that on a broader scale without requiring the question-asking side of things? Say you're a lab scientist and you have a small trick or bit of informal insight, how could you be prompted in the right way to share it?
Stack Exchange sites would love you to ask the question and then answer it yourself. It's not exactly primary use-case though so I suppose it's not obviously acceptable behaviour.
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#39I've been keeping my version of TILs on Quiver and Notes. You've inspired me to organize them together into Github and share. I'm thinking of making Gists for each categories instead of individual files though. Any reason why you created individual files?
Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame that I've been writing "SQL" all day and have unconsciously associated three letter non English words and "Is acronym". (Although I guess "git" is a word, although not typically part of my colloquial vocabulary... Maybe if I was a curmudgeon ~50 years ago as opposed to being a curmudgeon now) Regardless, your pedantry is excused :)
> I blame that I've been writing "SQL" all day and have unconsciously associated three letter non English words and "Is acronym". Hyperpedantically, "SQL" is an initialism, but not an acronym.
Perhaps even more pedantically, SQL is actually an abbreviation of an acronym. It was originally conceived as SEQUEL for Structured English QUEry Language[0], only being abbreviated to SQL for legal purposes (SEQUEL was already trademarked).
For this, and sheer convenience, I take the stance that it should always be pronounced as "sequel" rather than pronouncing each letter.