My Digital Garden

TL;DR - My digital garden is a public collection of notes on the web. It's organized for simplicity for me. Blogs are curated essays, notes are ~raw notes for me.

See site stats: Stats Page.

Welcome to my Digital Garden.

This is a place for personal notes I think are useful to share publicly. This is more docs / wiki than essays (essays will live under Blog). These notes are primarily written for me to reference / update over time so will be missing context by default - for full standalone pieces, read my blog posts.

Note guidelines:

• One idea / concept per note - like C#
• Start high level and split off into other notes as useful - like C# Functional Programming, C# Performance
• These are docs / wikis, NOT essays
  • Avoid writing time-based essays - Why x, How to Y, What is Z - those are better served on the Blog
• These notes are for me, not others - Keep it simple and succinct, do what works for me long-term
• Interlink wherever possible - this is what builds up the usefulness and interestingness of a digital garden over time
• Tags will be used sparingly - max of 5 per note. Prefer direct links to tags.
• Each note should ideally have a TL;DR, Overview, and primary takeaways to help summarize the note for easy future consumption

Reasons I may want to create a note:

• I think others will find it useful
• I want to be able to link to it online / in my blog posts
• I want to write about a subject that does not neatly fit into my blog
• I want to log some idea for posterity and grow it

These notes will range in size, quality, and usefulness.

• Could be a sentence or a book
• Could be totally wrong or deeply researched
• Might be broadly applicable or only useful to me
• They will frequently be in a rough draft state and may be updated / deleted at any time

Why I'm making a Digital Garden

A few reasons:

• To write more, publicly
• To enable deeper linking to ideas that don't fit on my blog within an atomic essay
• To play around with what it means to own and maintain a piece of the internet
• To grow knowledge over time vs one-off "snapshots" of thought

A great example where the digital garden fits better than my blog posts is for my projects. A blog post cannot by definition describe a project's whole lifecycle unless that project is already complete. But many projects go through various phases of on / off development so no one blog post could capture that. A note on the other hand could be used to link together all of those point-in-time posts so there is a central place to go vs an already-out-of-date blog post.s

I've been thinking ab hobbies I want to have long-term, especially as I now have to prioritize my free time more in order to get anything done (as a new father, I guesstimate I have ~8 hours less time per day).

A few hobbies that come to mind:

• Writing
• Building / Coding
• Exercise

I'm in these for the long haul and I came across Digital Gardening as I researched Personal Knowledge Management systems. It took awhile but after looking through various blogs and seeing the overlap in my own values / principles of Simple Scalable Systems I figured I'd give it a shot.

How this fits in with my other writing / note pursuits:

Public writing:

• Blog - Polished essays for broad public consumption. A snapshot of my ideas at one time.
• Notes - Wiki-style notes on a subject. Will grow and change over time.

Private writing:

• My personal notes - I keep personal notes in a digital garden like fashion but typically more wild and free than what will be public. I also have my own notes by domain. These will remain private as a thinking space but ideas frequently end up on my blog / notes.

In general ideas will flow in the opposite way - private to notes to full blog when I have my thoughts together.

Tech Stack

I built my own Markdown blog with C#.

• Backend: C#, ASP.NET
• Hosting: Hetzner

This is the latest in a series of refactors of my website which I've logged since ~2019.