One Thousand TILs and Counting

One Thousand TILs and Counting(github.com)

10 points by jbranchaud 5 years ago | 6 comments

simonw 5 years ago |

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.

jbranchaud 5 years ago | |

> 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.

nikivi 5 years ago |

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.

jbranchaud 5 years ago | |

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.

jbranchaud 5 years ago |

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

ChrisGranger 5 years ago |

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