The root origin of this digital space was the growing feeling of needing to learn voraciously, which I’ve already described in a separate post.
Building a digital space in this specific fashion was motivated by a few works on the internet that I had read/listened to over the years. I don’t want to repeat what already has been well said/written, so I’ll only briefly summarize my favorite tidbits here and provide links. Don’t be surprised to see heavy overlap between all these sources.
My notes are evergreen
See Andy Matuschak’s description of evergreen notes. In essence, these notes are plants meant to be grown and cared for.
All of my note-taking is done using Obsidian, and they are transformed into a pleasant web experience via Quartz.
Speaking of Quartz…
By the philosophy of Quartz, I am hoping to grow a densely connected web (it will be sparse at first) of thoughts and ideas, all while being accessible to the public.
Speaking of public…
There are many good examples of learning in public on the internet. People will often write about their engineering adventures, papers they’ve read, and technical deep-dives.
A common attribute among these kinds of work is that they are polished, with an authoritative tone to them. They are commonly retrospective, written after having experienced a journey or doing some research. Such works are what swyx categorizes as open knowledge.
In a talk, swyx proposes an alternative to open knowledge: open source knowledge. The focus here is to share the experience of learning with others. See learning in public for a brief summary, but I myself prefer the talk.
I’ll once again pull from Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research”:
“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”
Funnily enough, some even seem to claim that working with the door open opens up other doors. For example, Maggie Appleton:
”… if you ever needed another reason to learn in publicby digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.”
Only thing I’d add is don’t always assume I’m competent. Challenge if what I’ve said makes sense. But trust that I’m at least striving to be competent.
As a final add-on, here’s swyx’s visual representation of group learning:
A place of my own!
As a final reason why I made this space, it is simply nice to just have a presence of my own on the internet. See the IndieWeb for more.