One Thousand TILs and Counting

github.com

10 points·jbranchaud··6 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I wrote about my thinking and process behind this TIL repo here: https://dev.to/jbranchaud/how-i-built-a-learning-machine-45k...

Slight correction: the description for Get The Unix Timestamp references time instead of date.

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