Today I noticed that the amazing Simon Willison has a TIL blog, a little site for logging and organizing all the little things he’s learned. He got the idea from jbranchaud/til – who got the idea from thoughtbot/til).
So I figured I should carry on the idea-copying and make myself a TIL repo (dannguyen/til). And since the tradition is to keep the entries in Markdown format, I figured I might as well build a Jekyll site from it: https://dannguyen.github.io/til/
I’ve been struggling with maintaining my long-running personal blog at [blog.danwin.com][//blog.danwin.com] – maybe Twitter and HN has killed my desire and rhythm for doing long-form journaling. I’ve had slightly better success maintaining a Word doc that I occasionally journal, including mentioning my mood and what I’ve decided to try learning or working on a given day. I’ve also enjoyed curating my repo of command-line recipes (dannguyen/bashfoo), which is not only fun and easy to do, but incredibly helpful on a day-to-day basis.
So maybe a blog designed and focused on little TIL quips will help bridge the gap between tweets/informal diary jots and actual substantive blog posts. At the very least, I’m sure it’ll be helpful to have a centralized site where I can remind myself of the tricks and concepts I’ve learned and later forgotten.
And I need to freshen up my Jekyll and Liquid skills – I think that Jekyll is pretty much what I want for a static site framework these days. At least, for any kind of documentation that doesn’t merit a Sphinx setup.
Here are some other TIL blog sites that I’ve found that look pretty neat:
Since this entry is all about how Willinson got me started on TIL blogging, here’s some other stuff I’ve learned from Simon’s wonderful open-source work:
- Good practices and organization style when it comes to Click CLI interfaces, via his incredibly useful sqlite-utils tool
- Good practices in Python packaging via his simonw/click-app repo
- Countless SQLite tips