Why a digital garden?
August 06, 2020
By this time I’ve read a decent amout of posts and essays on how to get started. Breaking the barrier. Giving less in what the audience (if any) thinks. Just getting something out.
We’ve got developer blogs of all varieties, covering every technology and topic from small to really large and complex problems.
There’s Today I Learned; a nifty little format of small write-ups explaining and exemplifying a concept, syntax or language feature or simply just tips we’ve recently learned.
And then there’s a smallish (?) but interesting group of people maintaining digital gardens. It’s an informal kind of blog where one can publish freely. Publish unpolished pieces without worrying what others will think.
On top of these channels there’s a really cool idea and movement towards Learning in Public. As Shawn Wang puts it, it’s about creating a learning exhaust. Make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Open Source Your Knowledge.
Storing, organizing and publishing our knowledge is useful in many ways - here’s a few:
- It reinforces the learning
- It’s a reference for your future you
- It may be of help to others
- It’ll help you grow your network and career
All good, but I’m a senior, I don’t want to appear noobish
Despite all good outcomes it is still intimidating to start publishing. I’m a senior dev with 20+ years of experience designing and developing software, mostly backend (API’s, integrations, (micro)services, databases etc.) but more recently I’ve had the chance to also professionally do some full stack web development in JavaScript with Node, React, Firebase and even a few things serverless. It’s been refreshing and so much fun! So I’m in the process of turning the ship and these days I’m learning lots and lots of new and useful stuff that I wish to put down and get out.
And after seeing (and chuckling over) Scott Hanselmans tweet I already feel lighter on the publishing part:
Me: 30 years writing software for money
Also Me: Googles how to hide a div with a querySelector
Hang in there #codenewbies
Thanks Joel, Chris, Flavio, Dave, Scott and not least Swyx for inspiring me to jump in and start this particular garden.