Learn in Public (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Learn in Public (2018)

swyx.io

66 pointsmooreds18 comments

oh wow. surprised to see this old piece here. it has certainly far outlasted my own expectations in terms of people quoting it and citing me on it on a weekly basis, even today. an updated chapter was rewritten for my book https://learninpublic.org/ (which yes is a few years late in the promised V2... IT WILL HAPPEN)

questions welcome. it has continued to reap rewards for me and others who follow the practice long after publication (see: https://latent.space/, my current implementation), which is IMO the best validation I can have.

Thanks!

I'm a senior developer. Every now and then I'll debug something challenging and think about doing a nice write up about it -- but I don't have any existing online presence. I could throw a simple blog up on a website, but after posting an article there, I'm honestly not sure what to do next. Presumably at some point search engines will scrape it, but it likely won't have any meaningful search rank. I don't use social media. I could submit links to HN after I write each post, but that feels spammy and pretentious.

Any thoughts on what to do with a blog post after writing it?

I love this bit here:

>The subheading under this rule would be: Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You’re pushing yourself. Don’t assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve.

It requires an ongoing practice of humility _and_ extending grace to yourself for your own mistakes or misunderstandings (on the basis of "everyone makes mistakes and has to learn"), which can be a good starting point for showing that same grace to others.

thank you! i think also it addresses what i perceive to be the #1 criticism of LIP from others - that it creates a lot of "overnight experts" in a thing. so "wear your noobyness on your sleeve" is also "be honest about how new you are to a thing out of respect to your reader" - and if they know more than you, it prompts them to teach/guide rather than complain/dismiss.

Reminds me of a favorite quote from Fahrenheit 451:

> Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

My own form of learning in public has been to host book clubs for the books I have been reading and then taking notes, sharing insights about them through blog posts, discussing them on IRC channels, etc. I have done two such book clubs so far. The first one was for Introduction to Analytic Number Theory (Apostol, 1976) and the second one was for Mastering Emacs (Petersen, 2022).

I have the meeting logs, details, etc. for them available here: https://susam.net/cc/

I plan to begin one more on Galois Theory (Stewart, 2015) quite soon. I am just waiting for the hardcover book to arrive! If this type of thing interests you, I'd love for you to join the discussion either in the IRC channel or the Matrix room linked on the page above.

Addendum: For those who are interested in a wider range of computing topics, some of us from Libera IRC network have formed a computing literature reading channel named #bitwise. See https://bitwise.codeberg.page/ for the connection details.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29142158 - November 2021 (13 comments)

huh, didnt even know that one was there! ty!

I do it by sharing many of my notes using Obsidian Publish: https://notes.dsebastien.net/

honestly i paid the $20/month or whatever for a long time for this, but i dont think anyone ever went there. publishing to github https://github.com/swyxio/ai-notes is more than sufficient.

I would strongly encourage you to share this repo as a Show HN post. Your notes are of a high quality and I believe there is substantial value in sharing for those who might be curious and earlier in their journey in this domain.

eh im kinda embarrassed by it haha. its mostly 1yr out of date now. want to do a complete rewrite

Future you will thank current you for focusing on sharing what you have learned and can therefore teach vs being embarrassed it isn't tidy. Ask for help to cleanup, that is the journey.

> Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You’re pushing yourself. Don’t assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve.

Or did I not properly interpret this wisdom?

haha yes i know the irony. i have indeed asked a friend who wanted to apprentice w me with the cleanup but she's not super commited yet

This is absolute horseshit.

This industry is filled with peacockers who write posts about mundane things and it comes a race of bullshitting.

It’s ok to learn in private before you come to enlighten the whole world about your expertise.

>Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Don’t judge your results by “claps” or retweets or stars or upvotes - just talk to yourself from 3 months ago. I keep an almost-daily dev blog written for no one else but me.

>Guess what? It’s not about reaching as many people as possible with your content. If you can do that, great, remember me when you’re famous. But chances are that by far the biggest beneficiary of you trying to help past you is future you. If others benefit, that’s icing.

I feel like this is sorta counter to the "peacockers who write posts about mundane things", because it's very explicitly "these are my notes for me".

You might say "why in public, then?", and I think the value _does_ get to "if someone else benefits" -- but admittedly, that requires some straining out the obvious materials (but really, are you that likely to keep around a blog post about "today I learned what public static void main(String[] args) means" for your own reference later?)

Not only it doesn't benefit anyone but the majority of blog posts on topics are garbage and contain many mistakes. (Google search results are useless because of blogs by beginners)

I'd be careful to write blog posts willy nilly. It turns the entire industry into shit. Because if someone didn't blog about something, they are assumed to not know it in today's world.

LinkedIn is the worst offender, I deleted it because of constant endless corporate horseshit. |crypto| ai| enterprenours| who won't shut up making the more qualified people feel invisible.

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