Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I started publishing "TIL" posts a few years ago and everything in this post here resonated 100% with my experience of writing those.

The great thing about TILs is that once you form a solid set of habits around them they can be extremely quick to put together: the majority of my TIL posts take between 15 minutes and half an hour to write.

I make extensive personal notes on everything I'm doing (in GitHub issues threads or VS Code scratch documents) - turning those into a TIL is mainly about pasting those notes into a Markdown file and tidying them up a bit.

https://til.simonwillison.net/ is my collection so far.

I get a huge amount of value out of these. I don't particularly care if other people read them, the value is in helping me better understand the material and enabling me to refer back to them in the future.

I refer to some of them multiple times every week! This one for example, about Python packaging with pyproject.toml: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject

I have this odd fear that sharing what I learned today will make me look stupid.

“Look it’s 2023 this dude just learned about http error codes”. Silly example but you get the idea.

Obligatory XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1053/

Anyone who thinks they don't have gaping holes in their knowledge, and criticizes others for it, is probably suffering from a severe case of Dunning-Kruger.

Yeah, if I see someone criticizing others because "that's so obvious, everyone knows that" the person I lose respect for is that critic.

The TIL-framing is not integral to writing and publishing little snippets. You can always omit a framing and stick only to the information.

Don't be afraid to take advantage of Cunningham. if you try asking or looking something up and it's not accessible, you'd be surprised how many people would come swarming once you start writing about it, departed to correct you ad show you links to valuable tribal knowledge.

This is one of the reasons I'm so keen on publishing this kind of thing - I like to make the point that you can have 20+ years of experience and still celebrate learning something basic like how to write a for loop in Bash.

No-one knows everything. I respect anyone who is constantly learning new things, no matter how basic those things might be.

Here's the most basic one I published recently: https://til.simonwillison.net/html/scroll-to-text

I love this post for this exact reason:

https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/

It's written by Dan Abramov who has been instrumental in React's development

Such a great post.

That is such a good read.

If you always take yourself as being stupid, you will never have this fear in the first place ;)

You don't need to fear looking stupid. You gotta learn about it sometime ;)

Turn off the comments ;) Or just publish anonymously.

I was actually considering doing this on gemini, because I've got that fear too. An append-only log habit is definitely helping me lately, why not make it (semi-)public?

I think there's a single meachanism underneath both this and rubber ducking. There's something about getting your thoughts in order at a verbal (or textual) level that aids understanding.

You mister Simon, you are the inspiration! For TILs and Py modules.

I wonder what's drives you to make so many Py modules? Do you see reusing modules for your own projects or do you have some other grand plan?

For me, the single most important thing about Open Source is that it means I can solve a problem once and then /never have to solve that problem ever again/ in the future.

So any code I write I like to open source, because that's the best possible way I know of ensuring I won't have to waste time solving that same problem again.

The other thing that helps is that I think I've found a cure for project guilt.

I used to feel guilty about my projects - each one was Yet Another Thing that I should be spending more time on.

The fix I discovered was to make sure every single one of them has good test coverage and comprehensive documentation.

Effectively I treat each one as something which can stand on its own if I effectively abandon it - the thing works, and is documented, and other people can use it as-is without me feeling guilty that I'm not constantly actively working on improving it.

I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

How often do you go over these notes and review or study them? I don't mean ones you need and hence use, but all of them? I have an issue where I feel I have so many notes that I forgot what's in there, and sometimes I remember or find out when I don't need it, and I seem to lack a habit of reviewing my notes.

Some of them I remember and refer back to often. Others I completely forget even exist.

I added "related TILs" to my site a while ago - here's a TIL about how I built that: https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/related-content - and as a result occasionally I'll post a new TIL and the related ones will remind me of an older one.

Occasionally I'll completely forget the subject of the TIL itself! I was delighted to randomly stumble on this one here https://til.simonwillison.net/html/datalist the other day (after clicking my "html" tag from another TIL) which reminded me of the HTML datalist element, which I had forgotten existed.

I think it’s a great habit and an effective method for consolidating what one learns … at least until someone cheats themselves using GPT to write up a TIL essay.

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