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Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year
- existencebox 11y agoJust 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.
- ksenzee 11y agoCan I jump-start your list? "Git" is a product name, not an acronym. It's just spelled Git. (Please forgive me this act of pedantry, as I forgive those who commit pedantry against me...)
- existencebox 11y agoI 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) Regardless, your pedantry is excused :)
- dragonwriter 11y ago> I blame that I've been writing "SQL" all day and have unconsciously associated three letter non English words and "Is acronym". Hyperpedantically, "SQL" is an initialism, but not an acronym.
- npizzolato 11y agoTIL what an initialism is and how it differs from an acronym :) Funnily enough, Chrome is flagging it as a misspelled word, but googling for it brought up its definition in Google's usual definition box.
- anpat 11y agoI'd suggest google dictionary plugin. Double click on anything on the page and you get the definition as a small popup/tool-tip. That's how even I learned what Initialism is.
- groby_b 11y agoTry turning on "Ask Google for Suggestions". That should do the trick. Normal spellcheck is a dictionary. "Ask" is server-side magic that is context-aware and goes beyond dictionaries. After turning it on, try "icland is an icland" to be amused. Or "Brittaney Spears". I normally don't go on about this, but since this thread is about TILs... :)
- dtparr 11y agoOnly if you pronounce it "Ess-Kew-Ell" and not "Sequel", though, right?
- bcook 11y agoHmm, interesting. I think you are right. (NASA is an acronym. NSA is an initialism.)
- stdbrouw 11y agoPronouncing SQL as es-kyoo-el is a rookie mistake. Sequel!
- mastazi 11y agoThere are varied opinions about this topic. Several Sources of Truth and Righteousness advise against "sequel"[1][2], However it seems that in a certain building in WA "sequel" is preferred [3]. [1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/what-is-mysql.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/what-is-mysql.html [2] http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/faq/ http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/faq/ [3] https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/fd63b8a4-6a8a-4fed-8f37-131feddb0d60/how-to-do-actually-pronounce-microsoft-sql-server?forum=sqlgetstarted https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/fd6...
- greggyb 11y agoRedmond also colloquially refers to the product Microsoft SQL Server as just SQL (pronounced "sequel"), as in, "We're trying sell more SQL licenses," or, "Is the backing DB for your SAP installation Oracle or SQL?" This has led to some confusion. Additionally, as I pointed out in a sibling comment up the chain somewhere, SQL is an abbreviation of the original acronym, SEQUEL, for Structured English QUEry Language. It seems with this provenance that the "sequel" pronunciation is more historically correct.
- mastazi 11y agoThanks, I did not know about the SEQUEL acronym.
- CuriouslyC 11y agoFor fun, try trolling obnoxious people by pronouncing it like "squeal" :)
- MarkyC4 11y agoSquirrel
- greggyb 11y agoPerhaps even more pedantically, SQL is actually an abbreviation of an acronym. It was originally conceived as SEQUEL for Structured English QUEry Language[0], only being abbreviated to SQL for legal purposes (SEQUEL was already trademarked). For this, and sheer convenience, I take the stance that it should always be pronounced as "sequel" rather than pronouncing each letter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History
- vacri 11y agoI'm forced to disagree with you here. I take the stance that it should always be pronounced as "squirrel", because seriously, who doesn't like squirrels? :)
- cmurf 11y agoTree rats. :-P
- lkbm 11y agoSo, on top of this, they have since decided SQL is no longer Structured Query Language--it's just SQL.
- greggyb 11y agoWho's that? ANSI or ISO or someone else? I skimmed the Wikipedia article and didn't notice any mention of removing the initialism. I did find a note that the original language standard did define the "es queue el" pronunciation, but since no one is standards compliant anyway, I think I'll still stick with "sequel" (:
- lkbm 11y agoI actually can't find a source. My professor told me back in the day, and that's all I have. The talk page on Wikipedia has a lot of discussion, including a citation of a book, but I don't have the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ASQL#SQL_Acronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ASQL#SQL_Acronym Someone there also keeps saying that the second reference on the article explicitly says it's not an acronym, but the current second source explicitly says it is, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- abrookewood 11y agoFYI: The difference between an acronym and initialism is that the abbreviation formed with initialisms is not pronounced as a word, rather you say the individual letters, such as FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and DVD (Digital Video Disk*). Edit: Not a criticism, I just I didn't know.
- deizel 11y agoSomeone should tell this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7EgrY17Ozk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7EgrY17Ozk
- peteretep 11y ago> Hyperpedantically, "SQL" is an initialism, but not an > acronym I really wish people would stop posting this - I feel like I only ever see it posted here, too. OED's first entry on "acronym, n": > A group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for > a name or expression, each letter or part being > pronounced separately; an initialism (such as ATM, TLS) OED's second entry on "acronym, n": > A word formed from the initial letters of other words > or (occas.) from the initial parts of syllables taken > from other words, the whole being pronounced as a single > word (such as NATO, RADA) OED's entry on "initialism, n": > The use of initials; a significative group of initial > letters. Now spec. a group of initial letters used as > an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter > or part being pronounced separately SQL is both an acronym and an initialism. The Wikipedia article on "initialism" it is guilty of using very selective quotes in its "citation".
- danellis 11y agoMaybe he wrote it on his MAC before he uploaded to the WEB site.
- jbranchaud 11y agoEveryone at my company really got behind the idea of TILs too, so we created a little web app for it -- https://til.hashrocket.com/ https://til.hashrocket.com/
- dchuk 11y agoAny chance this is open source? Would love to set this up for my office
- jbranchaud 11y agoWe recently open-sourced it. Let us know what you think! https://github.com/hashrocket/hr-til https://github.com/hashrocket/hr-til
- michaelwww 11y agoI like it but upgrading ruby to the required 2.3 from 1.9 that comes with Ubuntu 14.04 turned out to be a daunting process. The 2.3 build was at least 15 min with several errors, and then bundler wouldn't work. I wiped everything ruby and will try again with RVM. It seems like over kill for such a simple app. I am not a RoR guy and my first impression is not very good compared to other server apps I've installed, or maybe I just need more patience!
- poloniculmov 11y agoI thing everybody in the Ruby world uses either RVM or chruby/ruby-install.
- nathell 11y agoOr rbenv.
- Soliah 11y agoI've had great success using Brightbox's Ruby PPAs https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ubuntu/ruby-ng https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ubuntu/ruby-ng. Might want to give them a try first.
- greggman 11y agoTUL git != GitHub
- destroyer998 11y agoThat is an awesome idea.
- jbranchaud 11y agoFor me, this is all about tracking my personal learning. I reference old posts several times a week. I hope others can learn from it as well!
- bigbang 11y agoGreat idea. Thanks for posting it. I'm motivated to do the same.
- mihok 11y agoReally 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!!
- jbranchaud 11y agoI generally take about 5 minutes at some point each evening to write up something that I learned that day or earlier that week. 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.
- mkobit 11y agoCool 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?
- tfgg 11y agoThis is great. 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?
- netcraft 11y agoand 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.
- OJFord 11y agoStack 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.
- dorfsmay 11y agoOP might not have enough karma to answer their own question.
- yitchelle 11y agoAnyone here remember Faqomatic [0] ? Remember using it around 2001. Very similar to Stack Exchange except without the karma points. [0] - http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/1.html http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/1.html
- ausjke 11y agogreat idea, I use drupal to keep some notes myself, but this is concise and easier to access, when this list grows you may want to add a search button to it?
- stygiansonic 11y agoGreat 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.
- jbranchaud 11y agoIt is fun to see what technologies I've been writing about the most over the long run -- Vim and PostgreSQL seem to be the big ones!
- cableshaft 11y agoI've been using http://www.devarist.com 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).
- mahmud 11y agoI 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.
- Raphmedia 11y agoTake 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. http://happenapps.com/#quiver http://happenapps.com/#quiver
- nodesocket 11y agoMy favoriate, check if port is in use: https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/unix/check-if-a-port-is-in-use.md 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?
- voltagex_ 11y agoPull requests will work there.
- eecks 11y agoI have done something previously in the past but never keep it up that long. I like your layout. Was it all manual? That is - did you have to do the index/readme manually?
- jbranchaud 11y agoyes, I just placed each post alphabetically as I went.
- 0942v8653 11y agoYour commit messages are remarkably consistent :)
- woodruffw 11y agoGreat idea! By the way, minor note on unix/copying-file-contents-to-system-paste-buffer.md: "pbcopy" is an OS X only utility, but X11 (Linux, BSD) has a rough analogue in the form of "xclip". Just in case you ever switch over ;)
- jbranchaud 11y agoGood catch, I ought to move that over to the Mac section.
- ladzoppelin 11y agoThank you. I was so excited when I read this, it would of been such a letdown.
- ghuntley 11y agopbcopy && pbpaste are also available for windows - https://ghuntley.com/archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-windows-released/ https://ghuntley.com/archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-w...
- topherjaynes 11y agoA great reminder that everyday we do learn something and should be thoughtful about documenting it. We often move to fast to realize that what we discovered, to get something down, is unique. Thanks for sharing and keep it up!
- ghjnut 11y agoI know this isn't intended to be stackoverflow, but it'd be cool to have a way to get feedback on things.
- ghjnut 11y agoI know this isn't intended to be stackoverflow, but it'd be cool to have a way to get feedback on things.
- benatkin 11y agoThis is awesome. It makes me want to do something like it. How about if instead of putting it in a public repo, I put it in a private repo that I can use as a draft for a blog, so I could use it to gradually build an audience.
- deadcast 11y agoWow cool idea! I've kind of already been doing something like this but posting little code snippets to my twitter account for later reference. I like the idea of creating a repo like the OP and not having to spam my followers with my random, crappy code! :~) Cheers!
- melling 11y agoI keep my org notes in a private repo, which I often edit directly on Github. I organize by topic. e.g. Cooking, Photoshop, Haskell, yoga, drawing, Go, Emacs, vim, etc. I use my two README.org to organize the information. One is for all topics and the second is a much smaller immediate README that I want to view daily. I keep it pruned since the main README has all the references. I'd like to breakout topics of general interest but I feel that I'd need to be more organized. Last week, however, I did move my Ergonomic Notes (e.g. RSI, keyboards, mice, programming by voice) to a public repo. https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes I also find it helpful to group topics and create menus in the org files: Menu: Ergonomic Keyboards | Ergonomic Mice | Programming by Voice | RSI
- reacharavindh 11y agoI've been keeping my version of TILs on Quiver and Notes. You've inspired me to organize them together into Github and share. I'm thinking of making Gists for each categories instead of individual files though. Any reason why you created individual files?
- state 11y agoWould be nice to connect this to Twitter and get an update when a new one appears. Have you thought of doing that?
- kragniz 11y agoThat's what newsfeeds are for. You can get an atom feed of the latest commits to any repo via github: https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/commits/master.atom
- voltagex_ 11y agoThanks for that. The HTML encoding is... interesting there - < is there, but > isn't replaced by >. How on earth is a feed reader meant to parse that?
- deathanatos 11y agoIn XML, you don't need to escape >, IIRC. So, it would seem some programmer is either lazy here, or trying to save bytes. You MUST escape <, as otherwise it looks like the start of a tag. Note that the content of the tag you see that in is serialized HTML, too, so at that point, there's HTML in the XML. (and not very good HTML…)
- jsgrahamus 11y agoI thought TIL stood for Threaded Interpretive Language, as per Forth or Factor
- cevaris 11y agowould be nice to auto generate these TIL readmes based off personal stack overflow upvotes.
- voltagex_ 11y agoEspecially when the correct / better answer is not the accepted one.
- voltagex_ 11y agoYou'd have to capture the action with a browser extension - it doesn't look like "who upvoted what" is exposed at all: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new
- leonardinius 11y agoThis is great. BTW I've lurked that concept from you just recently and started doing the same stuff on Sunday. Thanks for inspiration.
- ymse 11y agoLots of good stuff here. I would appreciate a wiki-style site with short answers like these instead of searching {Google,DDG} and trawling the [stackoverflow] results. Not all of them are necessarily good practice though. This made me chuckle: What Is The Current [Git] Branch? git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD (if you're reading this jbranchaud, try `git branch` :p)
- voltagex_ 11y agoYou could open an issue on his repo :)
- lunixbochs 11y ago`git branch` also determines whether your working tree is modified. This can be extremely slow on large repos. `git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` is very inexpensive in comparison, and doesn't print anything extra you might need to parse out if you're in a shell script.
- 0xCMP 11y agoAh yea this is awesome. I like this idea more than how I do my notes[0] because I don't actually do most of my notes in github where this makes more sense to actually commit and know when to commit/push. [0]:https://github.com/cmpis/notes https://github.com/cmpis/notes
- donretag 11y agoThe Pragmatic Programmer book talked about creating a solutions log, which can be consulted at a later time.
- StavrosK 11y agoI just thought about doing this for learning hardware design a few hours ago. I started dabbling a while ago, and writing down the things I learnt would result in a concise document full of compressed knowledge. I'll probably use a different format (a continuously updated page on my site), but it's the same idea. Thanks for sharing!
- macromaniac 11y agoI've been putting each fact I learn as a line in a til.yaml file for the last 6 months. I grep through all my til.yaml files any time I need to remember something. It's been useful.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI've had https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/Bash/commands.md https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/Bash/comman... for a while but this is much better. I have to resist the urge to automate the ToC, though. Edit: https://github.com/voltagex/til https://github.com/voltagex/til
- elwell 11y agoSmart to put it on GitHub. Works as a nice hack to appear super productive on public profile. My day-to-day commits are all private, so I look slow/lazy to the vagabond internet surfer or startup CTO hiring based on GitHub presence.
- ryanmarsh 11y agoWhen 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.
- jbranchaud 11y agoI 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.
- sotojuan 11y agoI 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.
- dwaxe 11y agoI was hoping you were a Reddit bot who's been farming /r/todayilearned for the last year.
- jonalmeida 11y agoThis is cool. For one of my internships, every time I learned something I wrote it out with a 'TIL' prefixed and put it in our group chat. At the end of the internship, I grepped the logs for all those lines but never found anything useful worth re-visiting. :)
- theyCallMeSwift 11y agoThis is one of the most interesting posts I've seen on HN in a while. Great job, keep up the good work!
- feed16 11y agoI wish technology was simple enough that writing these TILs would be unnecessary.
- emp 11y agoI've been using Notational Velocity for a while in this way. It's wonderful. Synced on Dropbox, my "little black book" is available on any device I have at hand, and instantly searchable.
- methodover 11y agoSomething I find really interesting is how VIM takes up a huge chunk of the TILs. One of my personal quirks is I feel like those terminal-based editors consume an undue amount of time and energy to learn and maintain. This TIL seems to give a bit of extra evidence for that suspicion. Simpler options have been available for years now (e.g., Sublime). In those rare moments when you do need to edit files on a remote server, nano is always available.
- hugozap 11y agoI'm learning Emacs and you are right, you need time and energy. They are powerful tools so that's expected. I'm enjoying the journey, but it's not for everybody.
- e19293001 11y agoNice to know your learning emacs. Try org-mode to implement the OP's idea.
- morninj 11y agoI agree that the Vim learning curve is steeper, but many of these TILs veer towards higher-level Vim wizardry--the kind of things that most Vim users will never both learning (and will never need to). Many of them are also way beyond the capacity of Sublime or Nano.
- morninj 11y ago*bother learning
- mbrock 11y agoIf you read the basic documentation for these editors, you'll know how to do the basic editing tasks in a day. After that, it's just years of learning more and more—which is a nice journey. Emacs and Vim are standard free software tools, so they get the new language modes and integrations, and they're available everywhere. By the way, I edit files on a remote server literally all day long.
- sledge 11y agoTIL systems administration is now called devops
- abrookewood 11y agoThis is a fantastic idea!
- kamaal 11y agoBrilliant. This idea can be extended beyond tech. Its common for a lot of musicians to keep practice log books. Trying to learn something new every day is an amazing idea, in area of work.
- anttuofbodom 11y agoI keep writing things down everywhere: OSX Notes, org-mode, Evernote, paper. Having it in one (public) GitHub repo is a great idea!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sbov 11y agoI used to use Evernote, now I use Microsoft OneNote. I can't imagine GitHub would be any easier to use. Your problem is likely one of consistency rather than the medium itself.
- dbailey5 11y agoGreat Idea! started one too.. decided to hack together a quick script to build my readme https://github.com/drewbailey/til https://github.com/drewbailey/til
- arvinsim 11y agoThis just convinced to just don't bother with using github pages and use the README.md file instead
- dorfsmay 11y agoAre github issues indexed as well as blog entries by search engine?
- TimJRobinson 11y agoI do this with my blog. Every time I discover something unexpected or google something and don't get a good answer I like to write a blog post with that search term as the title and the solution to the problem. Helps both commit the information to memory and help others in the future. Who said blogging had to be long form posts anyway?
- antoaravinth 11y agoThis is great idea. I always had other way to keep my learnings at a single place, for which I have used Anki tool. At times, down the line I open my Anki tool and see those flash cards on how much I really remember. This was very fun to me and also at the same time very good learning. Git looks to be an awesome idea. Thanks for your efforts.
- jamesmccann 11y agoReally cool repo - nice work!
- olejorgenb 11y agoI recently found out about `git log -G REGEX` (and -S) This will filter all commits (ie. lines changed by the commit) by the REGEX and report back the log for those. With -S, commits with equal number of matches in added and removed lines are ignored.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dxhdr 11y agoI don't understand the enthusiasm for this or the rampant forking going on. Most of these fall firmly under "let me google that for you." How do I check my Ubuntu version? How do I split a tmux window? How do I expand a clojure macro? Repeat for 300 more easily google-able questions... Actually I just realized, maybe I'm too old. If that's the case, here's a great tool: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+check+my+Ubuntu+version%3F http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+check+my+Ubuntu+version%3F
- salvadors 11y agoBefore googling for something you need to actually realise first that there's something that you don't know, but could. Lots of useful things don't fit that pattern. To take one example from here, I use 'pry' regularly, but before reading https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/editing-code-in-pry.md https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/editing-c..., I didn't even think to wonder whether there was a way to fire up an editor from within it. It's not something I've ever actively needed, but it's a very useful shortcut now that I know about it.
- Zombieball 11y agoI assume the value comes from the act of recording your learnings over sharing or later reading them. You sparked an idea for myself though! Don't gmail results now show up in Google search results? I can email myself my TIL findings and they will show up at the top (hopefully) the next time I google the same problem. Experiment time!
- lotyrin 11y agoYou google for them, then you rephrase to be concise to what you wanted, and in doing so help commit them to memory, and commit them into a publicly visible resource -- where somebody else might find them by googling. It's not REALLY useful, but at the same time it's really useful.
- MrBra 11y agoI think the added value in this is that by doing it then you can get back to the learning process going on in your brain at the time you wrote about it and this could resonate with many other stored but half-forgotten memories (for example that project that you were working on when you wrote that note, bringing in additional information). Moreover, nothing is more useful to the understanding of a subject than trying to explain it to someone else, including your future self (you can only say to have fully understand Relativity when you are able to explain it your grandparents? :) ) That's why I guess it's being seen as a good thing.
- gansai 11y agothanks for sharing. I remember seeing a reddit section for TIL which is general. I too had some thoughts regarding the same to publish in my blog.
- franzwong 11y agoThis idea is awesome that it makes learning more effective by self-explaining what we've learnt, and the result can be referenced by ourselves in the future using the language of our own.
- __Joker 11y agoThis, daily TIL, like dairy has for me is nice way of introspection. I find whenever, if nothing else, I think for 5 mins about what I did everyday had immense value for me personally.
- ShaunFinglas 11y agoDidn't know what a TIL was until just now. 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.html http://blog.shaunfinglas.co.uk/2014/09/developer-diaries.htm...
- roryokane 11y ago> Didn't know what a TIL was until just now. You’re supposed to say “TIL what a TIL is” :-) .
- ShaunFinglas 11y agoTIL how I should have said I learned what a TIL is :)
- bittersweet 11y agoI love this! I started doing this years ago as well via a simple notes dir in my dotfiles (example [1]), and actually wrote a small tool to help me with it [2]. This way I can list all the note files I have (cli, zsh, vim etc) and pretty print them a bit and have search if I can't remember the exact thing :) [1]: https://github.com/bittersweet/dotfiles/blob/master/notes/git.txt https://github.com/bittersweet/dotfiles/blob/master/notes/gi... [2]: https://github.com/bittersweet/notes https://github.com/bittersweet/notes
- jeshan25 11y agolove it! great work keep it up!
- kriro 11y agoI wonder how efficient this would be for non technical stuff. I like to read quite a bit (commute by train) and usually marker and scribble in the books. It's typically business, pop-science, philosophy or history etc...might end up with a list like: - Visiblity, Feedback, Constraints, Mapping, Consistency, Affordance from Design of Everyday Things - Maven, Salesperson, Connector from Tipping Point - 7 years' war cliff notes I feel like it would get too big soon but it's a nice way of keeping track of the interesting things you have discovered. I'm also considering putting my entire "Ideas" board and possibly other boards from Trello on Github instead. Edit: Related question: Is there any way to keep a bibtex file in Github and use it for citations in markup? That would be wonderful.
- schnika 11y agohttps://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/comparing-arrays-in-rspec.md#comparing-arrays-in-rspec https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/comparing... I really like the .contain_exactly() matcher for this purpose as well :)
- raddad 11y agoGreat idea. As someone who suffers sometimers, as opposed to Alzheimer, I tend to forget. I'll know I knew that at some point, and this list would be just the ticket. I tell people my memory is excellent but my retrieval tends to suck bad sometimes. Random access memory?
- oxplot 11y agoI've been doing this for years but sparingly and in my blog (in fact my blog's heading reads "because I forget simple little things too soon"). Never occurred to me to git it as that makes it effortless to record just about everything. Thanks for the idea.
- tarunkotia 11y agoThank you for sharing this! Thank you!
- xgordon 11y agoPersonally I have "knowlede base" document where are useful hints, commands and step-by-step guides how to do something (like: configure/code/export/filter etc.). Other text file contains useful links with other's step-by-step guide founded on internet. Github is interesting idea since it's available from my personal and working laptop. Till now i have used google docs/gmail draft messages.
- tieubao 11y agoTIL is the cool concept for all people and topics, not just for developers or engineering related stuffs. I apply the simple way to organize them via Github Issue -- https://github.com/tieubao/til/issues https://github.com/tieubao/til/issues It's good for us in term of effortless and easy for reference ...
- autotune 11y agoYou mean I could've scored upvotes by posting my wiki on here? Well better late than never... https://github.com/autotune/wiki https://github.com/autotune/wiki
- ngeek 11y agoWorthy personal cheat-sheet for own and others use. A good idea though.
- bewe42 11y agoI have been taking (plain text) notes for many years. My approach is to write down immediately everything I figure out. The biggest issue I have is to retrieve notes effectively. And to be faster creating them. I started experimenting with how to make the whole process better and have built http://codingbrain.com http://codingbrain.com. It's basically a better search, copy-n-paste, history tool that works on local markdown files. My other idea I'm currently working on is to provide a different kind of bookmarking service that gives you an option to write down what you have learned from that bookmark. I think one of the best way to get better is to always try to repeat from memory what I have learned. The service is supposed to compare my summary with the original content, maybe offer some Anki style repetition training etc
- vctsg3 11y agoWhat does TIL stand for?
- krapp 11y agoToday I Learned - from a popular subreddit /r/todayilearned/
- minhajuddin 11y agoI extracted a static site out of this and put it up at http://til.zammu.in/ http://til.zammu.in/ . This kind of content is great for Static Sites as people can easily contribute to them using Github Pull Requests.
- Flimm 11y agoWhen I learn something, I ask a question on Stack Overflow and I answer it myself, which is perfectly allowed and encouraged. The advantage with putting it on Stack Overflow is that I get corrections or better answers over time.