This is a space for cultivating my thoughts and ideas, using the concepts of Digital Gardens, the Zettelkasten method, and Learning in Public.
My interests are mainly in technology, software engineering and music.
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this... The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Further reading
In 2003, Martin Fowler wrote:
Beyond the name, however, there's the very ephemeral nature of blog postings. Short bursts of writing that might be interesting when they are read - but quickly age. I find writing too hard to want to spend it on things that disappear.
I have similar mixed feelings about wikis. I like the way they allow you to quickly put stuff together. But they can easily lead to long rambling sites.
So I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki. Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year's time.
A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.
This can be a bit difficult to achieve. I often end up with several notes with duplicated content. Perhaps making a conscious effort (or with suitable tools) to find links to previous thoughts can help to organise and grow my notes better.
Maintaining a public digital garden is an application of "Learn in Public". It's not about showing off how much you know - I don't think anyone is really interested in my writings anyway. What I think is that the knowledge that someone might just stumble across your possibly incoherent writings one day, makes you more aware and hopefully organise your thoughts more logically, and therefore learn better. It also helps me when I review my past notes. Just like coding, I should be able understand my own writings 6 months later. otherwise why write them down?