Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs

https://simonwillison.net/2020/Apr/20/self-rewriting-readme/

by pcr910303 • 6 years ago

205 31 6 years ago

simonwillison.net

simonw6• 6 years ago

This was inspired by "I've been writing TILs for 5 years" from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908044

dchuk2• 6 years ago

Alright, now I’m definitely going to build a little web app for this

littke2• 6 years ago

I recently started, come join me! https://todayilearned.co

@littke on twitter

kenrose• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I also recently started a TIL repo from the same inspiration and found it lame to write my first README entry. Will look at setting up what you described.

dchuk2• 6 years ago

If there was a public place for posting these with peers, that was built for TILs rather than just a repo, would you use it? Especially if it included an easy way to export all to markdown for backup?

This would allow folks to see each other’s TILs, search them, browse by tag, like/favorite each other’s TILs, and some other fun stuff eventually

hendry• 6 years ago

I find the hard dependency on Github a bit disconcerting.

Why not self host?

What happens if https://github.com/simonw/til drops away?

Love your work Simon.

simonw6• 6 years ago

My https://til.simonwillison.net/til site acts as a sort of off-site backup - but I should probably run a cron somewhere which pulls my repos. I have a Digital Ocean box I could do that on. Good idea!

johntash• 6 years ago

If you want a recommendation, try out https://gitea.io/en-us/ - it has a mirror feature that can periodically pull down repos for you.

I've been using it to backup some of my repos on github/gitlab, without having to rely on any of my own custom scripts/crons.

littke2• 6 years ago

I actually built a little webapp for this recently: https://todayilearned.co

For tracking and sharing of personal TILs

Also as an iOS app

NiekvdMaas• 6 years ago

To push back to GitHub, you can also use this action: https://github.com/ad-m/github-push-action

alwayslearning_• 6 years ago

Nice! I've been doing this for a while too -- https://github.com/raivivek/til

torvald• 6 years ago

Nice. I imagine this could be used to list and track TODOs in code as well.

aicioara• 6 years ago

What a coincidence. I implemented the exact same thing yesterday. It also happened to be my TIL for that day: how to create a Github Action.

My setup turned up much simpler, as I did not have some of the constraints that you wanted.

https://github.com/aicioara/til/blob/master/github/github-ac...

simonw6• 6 years ago

Hah, that IS a coincidence! Really nice solution you have there - very minimal, and achieves exactly the same job with regards to the README.

jmartinpetersen• 6 years ago

This is cool stuff. But could someone explain how this is a self-rewriting README? It looks to me like a file updated by a commit hook.

simonw6• 6 years ago

That's exactly what it is. Maybe "self-rewriting" isn't the best summary - it's the repo that does the rewrite, not the README file itself.

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

Your version doesn't have the clickbait name.

acdibble• 6 years ago

Also inspired by the same post, I set up a TIL repo. I went with a shell script where you pass the category and the filename and it creates the file and recreates the README: https://github.com/acdibble/til/blob/master/create_til.sh

chx• 6 years ago

What's wrong with Pinboard notes?

vklar• 6 years ago

Nice! Like the idea of tracking TILs with git. I've also made self-rewriting READMEs. I did something similar but using plain git hooks (post-commit) and sed. I had to run 'git --amend' in the hook though (to avoid generating double-commits) which is probably a bad idea.

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

It's automatically updated, not aelf-rewriting.

pdepip• 6 years ago

I actually wrote a tool like this that's aimed at storing and accessing information: https://mmap.it

The main difference is it provides full text search and global keyboard shortcuts so you can access it when you need it, without context switching.

mikelothar• 6 years ago

Seems like many of us had this same idea. :)

Here's my TIL implementation using Github Actions: https://github.com/mlpetersen/til

Mine is quite simple, you add new TIL's in the develop branch and commit them. Then it's built and added to the master branch.

auggierose2• 6 years ago

My TIL for today is that I learnt what TIL stands for. How useless.

auggierose2• 6 years ago

Actually that's wrong, in the morning I convinced myself that given a sequence of code points which forms a valid Unicode character (an extended grapheme cluster), any non-empty prefix of it also forms a valid Unicode character.

factorialboy• 6 years ago

Since when is programmatically generating a text file considered noteworthy / novel.

Or is this trending on HN because it has the "GitHub Actions" buzzword in the title?

Edit: This is a serious question.

simonw6• 6 years ago

Author here. I was really proud of this piece - it's a very detailed tutorial on how to use GitHub Actions, which for me fulfills exactly the kind of content I want to see on Hacker News.

It's the article I wish I had been able to read when I started working on this project.

jsilence• 6 years ago

Could this be implemented in emacs org-mode? How would one approach that task?

simonw6• 6 years ago

I've added an Atom feed now: https://til.simonwillison.net/til/feed.atom?_feed_title=Simo...

Implementation details here: https://github.com/simonw/til/compare/95d99f5bb7206948257195...

hivacruz• 6 years ago

I started doing TIL too. I made a quick and dirty bash script to generate a new article with read/vim/sed and automatically fill the README files: https://github.com/kinoute/til/blob/master/contribute.sh

cflynnus• 6 years ago

I thought this was a pretty good idea so I make a little reusable Github Action anyone could drop into their TIL repo to get an autogenerated README: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/til-auto-format-readm...

Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs

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