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 choice. Treat it as your "Accessible anywhere" personal cheat-sheet.
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)
When I was first learning UNIX many years ago a grey-beard told me to always keep a spiral bound notebook and pen at my side. It was great advice. Jotting down the arcane commands committed most of them to memory, for the rest my black little spell book held the magical incantation for any situation. I've since gotten away from that habit. Perhaps I should follow this fellow's lead.
I love this technique! I take notes in a small notebook during the day and then look back at in the evening to see if there is anything worth TIL'ing about.
I do this when learning a new language I know I want to know most of the STL of. Of course, most languages have similar functions for strings, lists, etc., but it helps a lot. Currently doing it for Elixir.
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.
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.
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!!
Cool idea! I'll definitely be stealing this. Have you thought of making it searchable or generating a site your posts? Anything you would have wished you had done differently since you started it?
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.
I've been using http://www.devarist.com (which was posted on HN back in August last year) to record little tidbits on an almost daily basis, and it's been working pretty well.
If it's something I have to look up I try to make a habit of putting it in there. Then I can do a search for the search phrase I'd normally make and it pops right up, saves me a lot of time looking through the top couple of documents for the nth time.
Devarist has Markdown support also. I've been using it to include little 20x20 icons for each programming language or technology so I can scan through the past pages to see at a glance which technology each note applies to.
That having been said, doing it in Github might actually be better for the public tidbits. Some things you learn kind of need to be kept private though (like your own projects, or pertaining to your job, or pointing out things you have trouble remembering to do).
I use a Google Drive directory full of markdown notes for this purpose. Edit with Writeily, the amazing Android markdown editory, or Macdown on desktop. Done.
Take a look at Quiver, that's what I've been using. It's markdown + code cells + text... I find it amazing for what it does. The evernode of code snippets.
Great job, and even better idea for putting it into a git repo!
I've been keeping a sort of "development log" for the past few years where, each day, I write a small blurb about what I've done, but more importantly, what I've learned.
It's a similar idea to this, but obviously a lot less structured. (The use of Markdown was a great idea, btw!)
This helps you get an idea for how much you have done if you ever find yourself questioning what you've been doing for the past little while.
Readit News
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 choice. Treat it as your "Accessible anywhere" personal cheat-sheet.
However, there is fundamental difference in representation.
(Please forgive me this act of pedantry, as I forgive those who commit pedantry against me...)
Regardless, your pedantry is excused :)
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?
[0] - http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/1.html
Defiantly thinking about doing something similar to this sometime soon!!
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.
https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/unix/check-if-...
Would be cool, to be able to collaborate and comment on each article. Perhaps, make this entire thing GitHub gists or Wiki?
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...
You’re supposed to say “TIL what a TIL is” :-) .
If it's something I have to look up I try to make a habit of putting it in there. Then I can do a search for the search phrase I'd normally make and it pops right up, saves me a lot of time looking through the top couple of documents for the nth time.
Devarist has Markdown support also. I've been using it to include little 20x20 icons for each programming language or technology so I can scan through the past pages to see at a glance which technology each note applies to.
That having been said, doing it in Github might actually be better for the public tidbits. Some things you learn kind of need to be kept private though (like your own projects, or pertaining to your job, or pointing out things you have trouble remembering to do).
http://happenapps.com/#quiver
I've been keeping a sort of "development log" for the past few years where, each day, I write a small blurb about what I've done, but more importantly, what I've learned.
It's a similar idea to this, but obviously a lot less structured. (The use of Markdown was a great idea, btw!) This helps you get an idea for how much you have done if you ever find yourself questioning what you've been doing for the past little while.