Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

by jbranchaud • 10 years ago

819 150 10 years ago

Just wanted to say, this is an excellent idea and I'll be blatantly stealing it for myself from this point forward; thank you for putting this motivation in my head by your successful implementation.

I've done a half-assed "important learnings from the last year" retrospective for myself, but your method of keeping it going forward is both far less lossy and more complete.

Putting it on GIT as well seems like a smart choice. Treat it as your "Accessible anywhere" personal cheat-sheet.

ksenzee• 10 years ago

Can I jump-start your list? "Git" is a product name, not an acronym. It's just spelled Git.

(Please forgive me this act of pedantry, as I forgive those who commit pedantry against me...)

existencebox2• 10 years ago

I blame that I've been writing "SQL" all day and have unconsciously associated three letter non English words and "Is acronym". (Although I guess "git" is a word, although not typically part of my colloquial vocabulary... Maybe if I was a curmudgeon ~50 years ago as opposed to being a curmudgeon now)

Regardless, your pedantry is excused :)

danellis• 10 years ago

Maybe he wrote it on his MAC before he uploaded to the WEB site.

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

Everyone at my company really got behind the idea of TILs too, so we created a little web app for it -- https://til.hashrocket.com/

dchuk• 10 years ago

Any chance this is open source? Would love to set this up for my office

yoda2• 10 years ago

I think coderwall have share protip model, https://coderwall.com/

However, there is fundamental difference in representation.

glibgil• 10 years ago

Meh, I think I'll skip the ah-ha moments of my coworkers who don't ask themselves "yeah, how else would you do it when you have already specified the precision?" https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/9c43748955-be-aware-postgre...

greggman• 10 years ago

TUL git != GitHub

destroyer998• 10 years ago

That is an awesome idea.

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

For me, this is all about tracking my personal learning. I reference old posts several times a week. I hope others can learn from it as well!

bigbang• 10 years ago

Great idea. Thanks for posting it. I'm motivated to do the same.

mihok• 10 years ago

Really well done and nicely organized. Did you find yourself noticing the overhead of writing these after learning something new? Or did you write them as an afterthought later on? Did you pick certain things to include rather than others?

Defiantly thinking about doing something similar to this sometime soon!!

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

I generally take about 5 minutes at some point each evening to write up something that I learned that day or earlier that week.

I've always viewed them as being quick and easy to write up which has taken away the intimidation that can come with trying to write a big blog post.

mkobit• 10 years ago

Cool idea! I'll definitely be stealing this. Have you thought of making it searchable or generating a site your posts? Anything you would have wished you had done differently since you started it?

tfgg• 10 years ago

This is great.

As an extension, I was discussing with a friend a while ago how great Stackoverflow is at capturing the contents of expert's brains. Is there a way to achieve that on a broader scale without requiring the question-asking side of things? Say you're a lab scientist and you have a small trick or bit of informal insight, how could you be prompted in the right way to share it?

netcraft• 10 years ago

and also tagging it in such a way that it can be found. I have thought about this before too - would be a great supplement to something like wikipedia.

OJFord• 10 years ago

Stack Exchange sites would love you to ask the question and then answer it yourself. It's not exactly primary use-case though so I suppose it's not obviously acceptable behaviour.

dorfsmay2• 10 years ago

OP might not have enough karma to answer their own question.

yitchelle• 10 years ago

Anyone here remember Faqomatic [0] ? Remember using it around 2001. Very similar to Stack Exchange except without the karma points.

[0] http://faqomatic.sourceforge.net/fom-serve/cache/1.html

ausjke• 10 years ago

great idea, I use drupal to keep some notes myself, but this is concise and easier to access, when this list grows you may want to add a search button to it?

stygiansonic• 10 years ago

Great job, and even better idea for putting it into a git repo!

I've been keeping a sort of "development log" for the past few years where, each day, I write a small blurb about what I've done, but more importantly, what I've learned.

It's a similar idea to this, but obviously a lot less structured. (The use of Markdown was a great idea, btw!) This helps you get an idea for how much you have done if you ever find yourself questioning what you've been doing for the past little while.

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

It is fun to see what technologies I've been writing about the most over the long run -- Vim and PostgreSQL seem to be the big ones!

cableshaft2• 10 years ago

I've been using http://www.devarist.com (which was posted on HN back in August last year) to record little tidbits on an almost daily basis, and it's been working pretty well.

If it's something I have to look up I try to make a habit of putting it in there. Then I can do a search for the search phrase I'd normally make and it pops right up, saves me a lot of time looking through the top couple of documents for the nth time.

Devarist has Markdown support also. I've been using it to include little 20x20 icons for each programming language or technology so I can scan through the past pages to see at a glance which technology each note applies to.

That having been said, doing it in Github might actually be better for the public tidbits. Some things you learn kind of need to be kept private though (like your own projects, or pertaining to your job, or pointing out things you have trouble remembering to do).

mahmud• 10 years ago

I use a Google Drive directory full of markdown notes for this purpose. Edit with Writeily, the amazing Android markdown editory, or Macdown on desktop. Done.

Raphmedia2• 10 years ago

Take a look at Quiver, that's what I've been using. It's markdown + code cells + text... I find it amazing for what it does. The evernode of code snippets.

http://happenapps.com/#quiver

nodesocket• 10 years ago

My favoriate, check if port is in use:

https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/unix/check-if-...

Would be cool, to be able to collaborate and comment on each article. Perhaps, make this entire thing GitHub gists or Wiki?

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

Pull requests will work there.

eecks• 10 years ago

I have done something previously in the past but never keep it up that long. I like your layout. Was it all manual? That is - did you have to do the index/readme manually?

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

yes, I just placed each post alphabetically as I went.

0942v8653• 10 years ago

Your commit messages are remarkably consistent :)

woodruffw• 10 years ago

Great idea!

By the way, minor note on unix/copying-file-contents-to-system-paste-buffer.md:

"pbcopy" is an OS X only utility, but X11 (Linux, BSD) has a rough analogue in the form of "xclip". Just in case you ever switch over ;)

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

Good catch, I ought to move that over to the Mac section.

ladzoppelin• 10 years ago

Thank you. I was so excited when I read this, it would of been such a letdown.

ghuntley• 10 years ago

pbcopy && pbpaste are also available for windows - https://ghuntley.com/archive/2016/01/20/pbcopy-pbpaste-for-w...

topherjaynes• 10 years ago

A great reminder that everyday we do learn something and should be thoughtful about documenting it. We often move to fast to realize that what we discovered, to get something down, is unique. Thanks for sharing and keep it up!

ghjnut• 10 years ago

I know this isn't intended to be stackoverflow, but it'd be cool to have a way to get feedback on things.

benatkin• 10 years ago

This is awesome. It makes me want to do something like it. How about if instead of putting it in a public repo, I put it in a private repo that I can use as a draft for a blog, so I could use it to gradually build an audience.

deadcast• 10 years ago

Wow cool idea! I've kind of already been doing something like this but posting little code snippets to my twitter account for later reference. I like the idea of creating a repo like the OP and not having to spam my followers with my random, crappy code! :~) Cheers!

melling• 10 years ago

I keep my org notes in a private repo, which I often edit directly on Github. I organize by topic. e.g. Cooking, Photoshop, Haskell, yoga, drawing, Go, Emacs, vim, etc. I use my two README.org to organize the information. One is for all topics and the second is a much smaller immediate README that I want to view daily. I keep it pruned since the main README has all the references.

I'd like to breakout topics of general interest but I feel that I'd need to be more organized. Last week, however, I did move my Ergonomic Notes (e.g. RSI, keyboards, mice, programming by voice) to a public repo.

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

I also find it helpful to group topics and create menus in the org files:

Menu: Ergonomic Keyboards | Ergonomic Mice | Programming by Voice | RSI

reacharavindh• 10 years ago

I've been keeping my version of TILs on Quiver and Notes. You've inspired me to organize them together into Github and share. I'm thinking of making Gists for each categories instead of individual files though. Any reason why you created individual files?

state• 10 years ago

Would be nice to connect this to Twitter and get an update when a new one appears. Have you thought of doing that?

kragniz• 10 years ago

That's what newsfeeds are for. You can get an atom feed of the latest commits to any repo via github:

    https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/commits/master.atom

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

Thanks for that. The HTML encoding is... interesting there - < is there, but > isn't replaced by >. How on earth is a feed reader meant to parse that?

jsgrahamus• 10 years ago

I thought TIL stood for Threaded Interpretive Language, as per Forth or Factor

cevaris• 10 years ago

would be nice to auto generate these TIL readmes based off personal stack overflow upvotes.

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

Especially when the correct / better answer is not the accepted one.

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

You'd have to capture the action with a browser extension - it doesn't look like "who upvoted what" is exposed at all: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

leonardinius• 10 years ago

This is great.

BTW I've lurked that concept from you just recently and started doing the same stuff on Sunday. Thanks for inspiration.

ymse• 10 years ago

Lots of good stuff here. I would appreciate a wiki-style site with short answers like these instead of searching {Google,DDG} and trawling the [stackoverflow] results.

Not all of them are necessarily good practice though. This made me chuckle:

What Is The Current [Git] Branch?

    git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

(if you're reading this jbranchaud, try `git branch` :p)

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

You could open an issue on his repo :)

lunixbochs• 10 years ago

`git branch` also determines whether your working tree is modified. This can be extremely slow on large repos.

`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD` is very inexpensive in comparison, and doesn't print anything extra you might need to parse out if you're in a shell script.

0xCMP• 10 years ago

Ah yea this is awesome. I like this idea more than how I do my notes[0] because I don't actually do most of my notes in github where this makes more sense to actually commit and know when to commit/push.

[0] https://github.com/cmpis/notes

macromaniac• 10 years ago

I've been putting each fact I learn as a line in a til.yaml file for the last 6 months. I grep through all my til.yaml files any time I need to remember something. It's been useful.

voltagex_6• 10 years ago

I've had https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/Bash/comman... for a while but this is much better.

I have to resist the urge to automate the ToC, though.

Edit: https://github.com/voltagex/til

elwell• 10 years ago

Smart to put it on GitHub. Works as a nice hack to appear super productive on public profile. My day-to-day commits are all private, so I look slow/lazy to the vagabond internet surfer or startup CTO hiring based on GitHub presence.

ryanmarsh• 10 years ago

When I was first learning UNIX many years ago a grey-beard told me to always keep a spiral bound notebook and pen at my side. It was great advice. Jotting down the arcane commands committed most of them to memory, for the rest my black little spell book held the magical incantation for any situation. I've since gotten away from that habit. Perhaps I should follow this fellow's lead.

jbranchaud8• 10 years ago

I love this technique! I take notes in a small notebook during the day and then look back at in the evening to see if there is anything worth TIL'ing about.

sotojuan• 10 years ago

I do this when learning a new language I know I want to know most of the STL of. Of course, most languages have similar functions for strings, lists, etc., but it helps a lot. Currently doing it for Elixir.

donretag• 10 years ago

The Pragmatic Programmer book talked about creating a solutions log, which can be consulted at a later time.

StavrosK• 10 years ago

I just thought about doing this for learning hardware design a few hours ago. I started dabbling a while ago, and writing down the things I learnt would result in a concise document full of compressed knowledge. I'll probably use a different format (a continuously updated page on my site), but it's the same idea. Thanks for sharing!

dwaxe• 10 years ago

I was hoping you were a Reddit bot who's been farming /r/todayilearned for the last year.

jonalmeida• 10 years ago

This is cool. For one of my internships, every time I learned something I wrote it out with a 'TIL' prefixed and put it in our group chat.

At the end of the internship, I grepped the logs for all those lines but never found anything useful worth re-visiting. :)

theyCallMeSwift• 10 years ago

This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen on HN in a while. Great job, keep up the good work!

feed16• 10 years ago

I wish technology was simple enough that writing these TILs would be unnecessary.

emp• 10 years ago

I've been using Notational Velocity for a while in this way. It's wonderful. Synced on Dropbox, my "little black book" is available on any device I have at hand, and instantly searchable.

methodover• 10 years ago

Something I find really interesting is how VIM takes up a huge chunk of the TILs.

One of my personal quirks is I feel like those terminal-based editors consume an undue amount of time and energy to learn and maintain. This TIL seems to give a bit of extra evidence for that suspicion. Simpler options have been available for years now (e.g., Sublime). In those rare moments when you do need to edit files on a remote server, nano is always available.

hugozap• 10 years ago

I'm learning Emacs and you are right, you need time and energy. They are powerful tools so that's expected. I'm enjoying the journey, but it's not for everybody.

e19293001• 10 years ago

Nice to know your learning emacs. Try org-mode to implement the OP's idea.

morninj2• 10 years ago

I agree that the Vim learning curve is steeper, but many of these TILs veer towards higher-level Vim wizardry--the kind of things that most Vim users will never both learning (and will never need to). Many of them are also way beyond the capacity of Sublime or Nano.

morninj2• 10 years ago

*bother learning

mbrock• 10 years ago

If you read the basic documentation for these editors, you'll know how to do the basic editing tasks in a day.

After that, it's just years of learning more and more—which is a nice journey.

Emacs and Vim are standard free software tools, so they get the new language modes and integrations, and they're available everywhere.

By the way, I edit files on a remote server literally all day long.

tinco• 10 years ago

If I'm not mistaken tpope, one of the most prolific members of the Vim community works at Hashrocket. I can imagine just being around him will result in an endless stream of Vim TILs.

abrookewood2• 10 years ago

This is a fantastic idea!

kamaal• 10 years ago

Brilliant. This idea can be extended beyond tech.

Its common for a lot of musicians to keep practice log books. Trying to learn something new every day is an amazing idea, in area of work.

anttuofbodom• 10 years ago

I keep writing things down everywhere: OSX Notes, org-mode, Evernote, paper. Having it in one (public) GitHub repo is a great idea!

sbov• 10 years ago

I used to use Evernote, now I use Microsoft OneNote. I can't imagine GitHub would be any easier to use. Your problem is likely one of consistency rather than the medium itself.

dbailey5• 10 years ago

Great Idea! started one too.. decided to hack together a quick script to build my readme https://github.com/drewbailey/til

arvinsim• 10 years ago

This just convinced to just don't bother with using github pages and use the README.md file instead

dorfsmay2• 10 years ago

Are github issues indexed as well as blog entries by search engine?

TimJRobinson• 10 years ago

I do this with my blog. Every time I discover something unexpected or google something and don't get a good answer I like to write a blog post with that search term as the title and the solution to the problem.

Helps both commit the information to memory and help others in the future. Who said blogging had to be long form posts anyway?

antoaravinth• 10 years ago

This is great idea. I always had other way to keep my learnings at a single place, for which I have used Anki tool. At times, down the line I open my Anki tool and see those flash cards on how much I really remember. This was very fun to me and also at the same time very good learning.

Git looks to be an awesome idea. Thanks for your efforts.

jamesmccann• 10 years ago

Really cool repo - nice work!

olejorgenb• 10 years ago

I recently found out about `git log -G REGEX` (and -S)

This will filter all commits (ie. lines changed by the commit) by the REGEX and report back the log for those.

With -S, commits with equal number of matches in added and removed lines are ignored.

dxhdr• 10 years ago

I don't understand the enthusiasm for this or the rampant forking going on.

Most of these fall firmly under "let me google that for you."

  How do I check my Ubuntu version?
  How do I split a tmux window?
  How do I expand a clojure macro?

Repeat for 300 more easily google-able questions... Actually I just realized, maybe I'm too old. If that's the case, here's a great tool: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+do+I+check+my+Ubuntu+version%3F

Zombieball• 10 years ago

I assume the value comes from the act of recording your learnings over sharing or later reading them.

You sparked an idea for myself though! Don't gmail results now show up in Google search results?

I can email myself my TIL findings and they will show up at the top (hopefully) the next time I google the same problem. Experiment time!

lotyrin• 10 years ago

You google for them, then you rephrase to be concise to what you wanted, and in doing so help commit them to memory, and commit them into a publicly visible resource -- where somebody else might find them by googling.

It's not REALLY useful, but at the same time it's really useful.

MrBra• 10 years ago

I think the added value in this is that by doing it then you can get back to the learning process going on in your brain at the time you wrote about it and this could resonate with many other stored but half-forgotten memories (for example that project that you were working on when you wrote that note, bringing in additional information).

Moreover, nothing is more useful to the understanding of a subject than trying to explain it to someone else, including your future self (you can only say to have fully understand Relativity when you are able to explain it your grandparents? :) ) That's why I guess it's being seen as a good thing.

bhrgunatha• 10 years ago

Sometimes it takes quite a bit of effort to get the results you need.

For example when you search for something specific that uses very common words. I'm not great at searching either, often I have to read through lots of results to get the answer I'm looking for.

Having a personal repository of curated results seems like a good resource to have.

gosub• 10 years ago

google does not create content from thin air, someone has to write it down first. this is it. maybe it will become google's first result?

salvadors• 10 years ago

Before googling for something you need to actually realise first that there's something that you don't know, but could.

Lots of useful things don't fit that pattern.

To take one example from here, I use 'pry' regularly, but before reading https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/editing-c..., I didn't even think to wonder whether there was a way to fire up an editor from within it. It's not something I've ever actively needed, but it's a very useful shortcut now that I know about it.

cableshaft2• 10 years ago

1. Usually you need to look through multiple posts to find your answer. It's still quick, but remembering you wrote up about it before and searching for it and seeing your more precise note about it is faster.

2. I've been using mine to also keep track of tools I encounter but don't have time to investigate, or for hotkeys or features in specific applications that I didn't realize were there before. I just took a quick glance at my old notes and was reminded about a feature in XCode that I had completely forgotten about since I wrote the note.

3. It's great for a refresher before diving back into a language you've had on the backburner for awhile, and/or before going in for interviews where you know you're going to be quizzed on random knowledge from past languages you've used before but maybe not recently.

gansai• 10 years ago

thanks for sharing. I remember seeing a reddit section for TIL which is general. I too had some thoughts regarding the same to publish in my blog.

franzwong• 10 years ago

This idea is awesome that it makes learning more effective by self-explaining what we've learnt, and the result can be referenced by ourselves in the future using the language of our own.

__Joker• 10 years ago

This, daily TIL, like dairy has for me is nice way of introspection. I find whenever, if nothing else, I think for 5 mins about what I did everyday had immense value for me personally.

ShaunFinglas2• 10 years ago

Didn't know what a TIL was until just now.

However I've been doing something very similar for over a year now. Its called a Developer Diary. I can't give credit for the talk that gave me this idea but it's without doubt one of the best changes I've made to further myself.

It's the same idea, except the content is not public. I've toyed with the idea but the content is very rough plus includes some very specific details. That said I host the content so it's always in my browser as plain text files, so able to search and navigate easily. I've blogged about the idea before, but however you do it, make notes. Your future self will thank you.

http://blog.shaunfinglas.co.uk/2014/09/developer-diaries.htm...

roryokane• 10 years ago

Didn't know what a TIL was until just now.

You’re supposed to say “TIL what a TIL is” :-) .

ShaunFinglas2• 10 years ago

TIL how I should have said I learned what a TIL is :)

bittersweet• 10 years ago

I love this! I started doing this years ago as well via a simple notes dir in my dotfiles (example [1]), and actually wrote a small tool to help me with it [2]. This way I can list all the note files I have (cli, zsh, vim etc) and pretty print them a bit and have search if I can't remember the exact thing :)

[1] https://github.com/bittersweet/dotfiles/blob/master/notes/gi...

[2] https://github.com/bittersweet/notes

jeshan25• 10 years ago

love it! great work keep it up!

kriro• 10 years ago

I wonder how efficient this would be for non technical stuff. I like to read quite a bit (commute by train) and usually marker and scribble in the books. It's typically business, pop-science, philosophy or history etc...might end up with a list like:

- Visiblity, Feedback, Constraints, Mapping, Consistency, Affordance from Design of Everyday Things

- Maven, Salesperson, Connector from Tipping Point

- 7 years' war cliff notes

I feel like it would get too big soon but it's a nice way of keeping track of the interesting things you have discovered.

I'm also considering putting my entire "Ideas" board and possibly other boards from Trello on Github instead.

Edit: Related question: Is there any way to keep a bibtex file in Github and use it for citations in markup? That would be wonderful.

schnika• 10 years ago

https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/comparing...

I really like the .contain_exactly() matcher for this purpose as well :)

raddad• 10 years ago

Great idea. As someone who suffers sometimers, as opposed to Alzheimer, I tend to forget. I'll know I knew that at some point, and this list would be just the ticket.

I tell people my memory is excellent but my retrieval tends to suck bad sometimes. Random access memory?

oxplot• 10 years ago

I've been doing this for years but sparingly and in my blog (in fact my blog's heading reads "because I forget simple little things too soon"). Never occurred to me to git it as that makes it effortless to record just about everything. Thanks for the idea.

tarunkotia• 10 years ago

Thank you for sharing this! Thank you!

xgordon• 10 years ago

Personally I have "knowlede base" document where are useful hints, commands and step-by-step guides how to do something (like: configure/code/export/filter etc.).

Other text file contains useful links with other's step-by-step guide founded on internet.

Github is interesting idea since it's available from my personal and working laptop. Till now i have used google docs/gmail draft messages.

tieubao• 10 years ago

TIL is the cool concept for all people and topics, not just for developers or engineering related stuffs.

I apply the simple way to organize them via Github Issue -- https://github.com/tieubao/til/issues

It's good for us in term of effortless and easy for reference ...

autotune• 10 years ago

You mean I could've scored upvotes by posting my wiki on here? Well better late than never...

https://github.com/autotune/wiki

ngeek• 10 years ago

Worthy personal cheat-sheet for own and others use. A good idea though.

bewe42• 10 years ago

I have been taking (plain text) notes for many years. My approach is to write down immediately everything I figure out. The biggest issue I have is to retrieve notes effectively. And to be faster creating them. I started experimenting with how to make the whole process better and have built http://codingbrain.com. It's basically a better search, copy-n-paste, history tool that works on local markdown files.

My other idea I'm currently working on is to provide a different kind of bookmarking service that gives you an option to write down what you have learned from that bookmark. I think one of the best way to get better is to always try to repeat from memory what I have learned. The service is supposed to compare my summary with the original content, maybe offer some Anki style repetition training etc

vctsg3• 10 years ago

What does TIL stand for?

krapp• 10 years ago

Today I Learned - from a popular subreddit /r/todayilearned/

minhajuddin• 10 years ago

I extracted a static site out of this and put it up at http://til.zammu.in/ . This kind of content is great for Static Sites as people can easily contribute to them using Github Pull Requests.

Flimm• 10 years ago

When I learn something, I ask a question on Stack Overflow and I answer it myself, which is perfectly allowed and encouraged. The advantage with putting it on Stack Overflow is that I get corrections or better answers over time.

Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

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