Digital Gardening | Hacker News Reader

Digital Gardening

nicolasbouliane.com

170 pointsnicbou77 comments

My first experience with the term “digital gardening” was in this adult swim commercial for “For Profit Online University”. In that context digital gardeners were basically people given jobs on Mechanical Turk. Ive used the term with my friends over the last decade to describe any sort of endless digital grind-like toil. New crypto games come to mind. (So does Animal Crossing…)

https://youtu.be/XQLdhVpLBVE (Concept is introduced at 6:30, but the whole video is hilarious)

Also present in this great piece: https://herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-is-my-garden/

That was also my first thought; I'm having a hard time decoupling the OP's thoughtful metaphor from that absurd sketch.

A sandwich will be mailed to you later

Isn’t this kind of like Soylent branding. Not sure if that shake company name was tongue in cheek or if they didn’t know there’s a Charlton Heston movie called Soylent Green where the Soylent refers to the color of the edible substance made from humans

Digital gardening is a meaningful task!

I’m not afraid of H.O.W.A.RD.

Feel free to post your digital garden under to not pollute this garden too much. Gardeners like to see other gardens.

There are different kinds of digital gardens. Mine[0] lives on Github and it evolves slowly these days but I like to think that is well tendered and organized - for my taste. There's some juicy fruit and vegetables. Probably you will find some weeds also but weeds are flowers too when you get to know them.

[0] https://github.com/slowernews/notebook

my garden - https://olin.monster/

My garden - https://notado.app

Here’s mine (just finished a landscaping project!): https://obviy.us

Here's mine https://wiki.nikiv.dev

Code here: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

I see the visualization, it's an image/not interactive?

I want to make them interactive, currently it's just an image.

https://mattnorris.dev

Digital Zen Garden - https://notes.binnyva.com/ :-)

How was this published? The format is incredibly easy to navigate.

Also I found the content very useful. Thank you for sharing.

Not OP, but looking at the source it looks like it's Gatsby. Not sure about the theme used.

It's this Gatsby theme - it's a great piece of work! https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-garden/

https://www.escape-team.com

Why not :) https://mfashby.net/

Loved your blogging style. Would be curious to see more about your journey learning clojure and maybe some highlights and examples of what you learn by using the new language.

Feel inspired to start writing myself.

Thanks! I can recommend writing, even just short stuff, I think it helps consolidate things you have learned (or just lets you show off your skateboard collection)

if/when I get back to clojure, maybe I'll even code something in it and write about it after :)

Here's mine: https://attejuvonen.fi

Mine is my startup : https://atomictessellator.com

When I'm not doing core product, I'm gardening - Importing new datasets, trying out "growing" new neural nets, exploring niche areas not related to the core product, improving the speed of execution, making the interfaces cleaner.

All of these tasks are like gardening in that they are not product critical, but it's a relaxing activity at the end of the day to "potter in the digital garden"

Here’s mine: https://mtsolitary.com

My desktop environment in the browser which is also my personal website and my life long project.

- https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS

- https://dustinbrett.com/

Your web page and those similar excel in relation to my own interpretation of what a “digital garden” is by being architecturally sound. I mean that I can visit your page not knowing what to expect but after reading the headings, I can instantly tell that I am interested in what’s being offered. Good information architecture is really what makes personal websites or blogs that are given the label “digital gardens” stand out to me.

I’m still working on mine, if it is destined for me to ever share…

Decoupling a garden from profit motives helps a lot in that regard. When you're not trying to my lure anyone into a sales funnel, you can afford straight talk.

Mine is https://datacrayon.com

Freshly planted: https://pausestate.com/

Not much has grown yet, but a new space to think.

I’ve been working on mine the past couple of weeks i love the idea of things not having to be perfect!

https://www.apricot13.org/

Wiki-type garden, written in a forth-like assembly. I've been taking care of it for 17 years now, 500+ pages

- browser: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html

- source: https://github.com/XXIIVV/oscean/blob/main/src/oscean.tal

no way, are you part of 100 rabbits?, I've been following your sailboat posts for a while and I've cooked a bunch of the recipes from your site. So cool to see you here.

Hey! Yes, I am! Glad you've enjoyed the recipes on Grimgrains :D

https://www.thomasantony.com/notes/

I recently exported my kind-of-zettelkasten markdown notes repository to my website.

Hey, your Differential Geometry page seems to serve a bad cert or incomplete chain.

Edit: seems to be working well now.

Github Pages does that sometimes. Not sure how to fix it.

https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com and https://mattchung.me

Mine https://www.andrewshay.me/

https://github.com/sw-yx/brain

github with obsidian

https://tdarb.org

I love this metaphor. I get enormous satisfaction from tending to my digital garden, just pottering around for no reason other than fun. Mine is https://www.longfetch.com/

I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s gardens in this thread too.

https://www.andreiboar.com/

Mainly writing about Software and Programming in Golang

I have my digital garden as a mediawiki-based website which is only accessible within my home network (and my vpn).

It runs on a small (yet capable!) computer in the corner of my living room.

It's lovely because mediawiki is just great, and I share that garden with my SO.

Among the niceties, I have collected the PDF manuals for the various appliances that we bought over the years, and there's a nice template to embed the pdf into a wiki page. No need for wondering where that instruction manual is today.

Taking tech notes works very well too, because mediawiki can display math just fine (mathjax and stuff) and can highlight code in a decent amount of languages.

Oh, and galleries look beautiful in mediawiki. And the template (the Timeless skin) looks nice on mobile too.

The editing experience is nice, now that VisualEditor is built-in into MediaWiki.

After two years and a couple hundred pages, it only weighs about ~350 megabytes.

I'm thinking about making a public version, as a personal website.

Notes:

- i'd love to have the ability to install an equivalent of the mobile app for my private wiki.

- the computer is a fujitsu esprimo q520 (core i5-4590T 4c4T, 16GB ram, 250gb main ssd + 1tb data ssd + 4TB backup external magnetic disk).

I'd would export your mediawiki into zim format and then access that one with a mobile client like kiwix https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Mediawiki_offline_content#Ki... https://www.kiwix.org/en/download/

For reading the usual theme is fine.. the problem is editing. I’d like to be able to edit on mobile too, but in a comfortable manner.

It is an apt metaphor I use regularly as I have a large and growing vegetable and flower garden as well as a growing server farm with services I tend to more than others. They are both labors of love, learning, and growth. I share the fruits of both with friends and family.

I've just come to conclusion I need a composter in the corner. Too much half-done stuff.

We run our company with a forest in mind. Client projects are gardens within the forest. We have a green house for seedlings (innovation projects), we have a fire in the center, where we regularly meet and hang out. We have an outlook point, where we look out to sense what’s on the horizon… obviously, we don’t want our gardens full of weeds or trash laying around.

Similarly:

"My product is my garden" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26012189

"My blog is a digital garden" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876273

You can think of your mind as a garden as well: https://newsletter.smarter.blog/p/mind-as-a-garden

Mine is more like a rainforest disappearing due to deforestation, if I'm being honest.

This is a great post.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/motorcycle-maintenance

I like this metaphor too. A personal space for blogging and small projects gives me more long term satisfaction than my day job. (It has more longevity too.)

My projects can be polished or rough, technically boring or complex, and have as little or significant purpose as I want.

They won’t be cancelled by changing business needs, rushed by deadlines, and corrupted by politics.

The important part is to make that space truely personal.

The first versions of my personal website were tame online resumes. This one is deliberately more personal, less refined.

That is a great metaphor. I find it very calming to tend to my website[0].

The operating system is the soil and the html-pages the green stuff.

[0] https://chai.guru/www

This is how I treat my NixOS config repo.

I'm always up for checking a well-kept garden, care to share?

Unfortunately there is no DM capability on HN, otherwise I'd share it. Prefer to stay anonymous on here.

Understood! If you think your config is particularly nice I created an proton.me account as mush_room_hn, I'm a nix config collector of sorts ;-).

What software would you recommend to maintain a 'community garden', collectively with others? Where the tech isn't in-your-face and leaves room to be creative together, stimulating people to contribute. Of course, this could be any forum or collaboration software combined with good old community-building, but maybe there's software that particularly fits this 'gardening' idea.

This is entirely up to you. Simple is better.

However the stack itself is part of the garden. I enjoy overengineering mine as much as I enjoy publishing things on it.

"Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?" Zarathustra, prologue

https://aeon.co/videos/amid-the-chaos-of-being-nietzsche-bel...

I love this. Having operated https://rietta.com for 23 years and counting. Maintaining links and pages that are no longer my focus but history would be lessoned to have them vanish. It goes through phases that I fail to tend to it properly and then rushes to catch up and “save the plants”.

Mine is not public but I keep recreating note taking apps and messing around with finances (helps me feel more at ease about my life).

I feel like it's pointless to keep remaking the same thing... doesn't seem like you're advancing. In my case cross-platform variations of CRUD apps.

It is nice though being able to make a tool for yourself.

I have written the same file parser over a dozen times. It's my default project when learning a new language.

Sometimes, newer solutions to different parts of the parser, having been discovered in the new language, find their way into the older versions.

I don't know if this qualifies as "gardening" but I've really enjoyed this experience because I can easily see growth. But maybe it really is pointless.

I am trying to figure out a more robust data store than just local MySQL on my Pi. I have encrypted data store on remote severs (by pass key/active login not RDS). But gotta deal with syncing...

Unrelated ranting

Also trying to think of ways to quickly write/access it any time. From other devices besides phones/computers seems pointless but yeah integrated into body somehow. Future.

Low res display on clothes. Conductive skin wrap. Wifi power harvesting posters. Projected keyboard grid these were cool. Vibration qwerty from bracelet. Vibrations felt from the desk. Doesn't make sense you need some way to see till Mojo contact is cheap, contacts suck though to put in/take out.

Hehe projected compute. You mount a projector on your ceiling, rotating mount has audio listener. Snap your finger, it goes to you, projects display on nearby space (cam), type on your legs by vibration and tap wall for mouse click. Also pointless why.

It's sometimes interesting to see all the revisions done to a blogpost. This is easy to do if the blog is hosted on Github Pages (which many blogs are). You can see a diff of each change and amendment (they're mostly typos). With a bit of digging you can hunt down the Github profile where the blog is hosted and have a nose.

That is also how I see my side projects. Some things will grow, some won’t. All good. Enjoy the garden - and the work!

This garden seems to be his job, so it's not quite as free as a side project!

It started as a work of love and remained that way.

The transition to living from it makes a big difference, even if you want to pretend it doesn't. However it's been so steady that I can afford puttering around and feel secure that the bills will get paid.

I can also tell advertisers to shove it, a rare privilege.

Curiously, I see digital garden speak from people using tools like Obsidian or Logseq. Instead of knowledge graphs, I propose knowledge gardens.

Here's mine: https://www.iancollmceachern.com/blog

Vegan Devops:

Treat servers like crops, not gardens.

Are there any self-proclaimed digital farmers on the loose?

There's a big list under another comment. Each website posted is fascinating

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