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Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

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Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#121

Post by ShaunFinglas »

Didn't know what a TIL was until just now.

However I've been doing something very similar for over a year now. Its called a Developer Diary. I can't give credit for the talk that gave me this idea but it's without doubt one of the best changes I've made to further myself.

It's the same idea, except the content is not public. I've toyed with the idea but the content is very rough plus includes some very specific details. That said I host the content so it's always in my browser as plain text files, so able to search and navigate easily. I've blogged about the idea before, but however you do it, make notes. Your future self will thank you.

http://blog.shaunfinglas.co.uk/2014/09/developer-diaries.htm...

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#122

Post by greggman »

existencebox wrote: post #2

Just 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…

TUL git != GitHub

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#123

Post by bittersweet »

I love this! I started doing this years ago as well via a simple notes dir in my dotfiles (example [1]), and actually wrote a small tool to help me with it [2]. This way I can list all the note files I have (cli, zsh, vim etc) and pretty print them a bit and have search if I can't remember the exact thing :)

[1]: https://github.com/bittersweet/dotfiles/blob/master/notes/gi...

[2]: https://github.com/bittersweet/notes

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#125

Post by ghuntley »

woodruffw wrote: post #22

Great idea! By the way, minor note on unix/copying-file-contents-to-system-paste-buffer.md: "pbcopy" is an OS X only utility, but X11 (Linux, BSD) has a rough analogue in the form of "xclip". Just in case you ever switch over ;)

pbcopy && pbpaste are also available for windows - https://ghuntley.com/archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-w...

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#126

Post by yitchelle »

OJFord wrote: post #38
tfgg wrote: post #7

This 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.

Anyone here remember Faqomatic [0] ? Remember using it around 2001. Very similar to Stack Exchange except without the karma points.

[0] - http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/1.html

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#127

Post by nathell »

poloniculmov wrote: post #119
michaelwww wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it but upgrading ruby to the required 2.3 from 1.9 that comes with Ubuntu 14.04 turned out to be a daunting process. The 2.3 build was at least 15 min with several errors, and then bundler wouldn't work. I wiped everything ruby and will try again with RVM. It seems like over kill for such a simple app. I am not a RoR guy and my first impression is not very good compared to other server apps I've installed, or…

I thing everybody in the Ruby world uses either RVM or chruby/ruby-install.

Or rbenv.

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#128

Post by kriro »

I wonder how efficient this would be for non technical stuff. I like to read quite a bit (commute by train) and usually marker and scribble in the books. It's typically business, pop-science, philosophy or history etc...might end up with a list like:

- Visiblity, Feedback, Constraints, Mapping, Consistency, Affordance from Design of Everyday Things

- Maven, Salesperson, Connector from Tipping Point

- 7 years' war cliff notes

I feel like it would get too big soon but it's a nice way of keeping track of the interesting things you have discovered.

I'm also considering putting my entire "Ideas" board and possibly other boards from Trello on Github instead.

Edit: Related question: Is there any way to keep a bibtex file in Github and use it for citations in markup? That would be wonderful.

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#129

Post by glibgil »

jbranchaud wrote: post #37
existencebox wrote: post #2

Just 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/

Meh, I think I'll skip the ah-ha moments of my coworkers who don't ask themselves "yeah, how else would you do it when you have already specified the precision?" https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/9c43748955-be-aware-postgre...

Re: Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

#130

Post by tinco »

methodover wrote: post #74

Something I find really interesting is how VIM takes up a huge chunk of the TILs. One of my personal quirks is I feel like those terminal-based editors consume an undue amount of time and energy to learn and maintain. This TIL seems to give a bit of extra evidence for that suspicion. Simpler options have been available for years now (e.g., Sublime). In those rare moments when you do need to edit files on a remote ser…

If I'm not mistaken tpope, one of the most prolific members of the Vim community works at Hashrocket. I can imagine just being around him will result in an endless stream of Vim TILs.
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