One Thousand TILs and Counting

10 points by jbranchaud 4 years ago | 6 comments
  • simonw 4 years ago
    I started my own TIL collection inspired by Josh and it's been fantastic - I'm up to 102 now: https://til.simonwillison.net/

    The thing I love about these compared to regular blogging is that they reduce the barrier to writing something up to almost nothing. Did I learn something? If yes, I can write it up as a TIL - no pressure at all for it to be anything novel or interesting to other people.

    I refer back to mine a LOT. The principal audience for them is future me - if anyone else finds them useful too that's just a bonus.

    • jbranchaud 4 years ago
      > I refer back to mine a LOT. The principal audience for them is future me - if anyone else finds them useful too that's just a bonus.

      100% this. Several times a week I'll be trying to do something, remember I've written about, and then find a TIL my past-self wrote that explains how to do the thing. It's really satisfying each time it happens.

    • nikivi 4 years ago
      One issue I find as I do a similar thing to the author with small notes/points of knowledge, in form of wiki (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge). Is that it makes sharing things harder as it feels wasteful to share small notes on twitter/hn/..

      But besides that, it's strictly superior format as it evolves with time compared to big well researched articles that are more worthy to share.

      • jbranchaud 4 years ago
        Because all these posts are 200 words or less, they tend to be the kind of thing you can read in ~90 seconds. I like sharing these smaller learnings to twitter. For a venue like HN though, I agree they don't meet quite the effort threshold.
      • jbranchaud 4 years ago
        I wrote about my thinking and process behind this TIL repo here: https://dev.to/jbranchaud/how-i-built-a-learning-machine-45k...
        • ChrisGranger 4 years ago
          Slight correction: the description for Get The Unix Timestamp references time instead of date.