Blog: #digital-gardens

Katherine Rundell on giraffes. Unexpectedly fascinating.

Sokyokuban, a Sokoban game set on a hyperbolic plane. Mind-bending in a great way.

Shawn Wang on preemptive pluralization when developing software. This seems like a wise practice. (Not following it has bitten me more than once.)

Michael Mulet on how he made a video game in a font. Fascinating and horrifying.

Alan Jacobs on blog gardens. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of writing about the same topic in depth over longer periods of time as a way of organically writing what effectively amounts to a book.

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• Bret Victor’s Dynamicland — they had me at “a non-profit long-term research group in the spirit of Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC”
• James Somers on how more people should write — amen and amen
• Joel Hooks on blogs and digital gardens — this makes me want to finish my revamp of Slash so I can more easily add an actual digital garden to this site (and at some point I’ll write about that revamp since I don’t think I’ve gone into any detail on it)
• Amy Hoy on how blogs broke the web — it’s not quite as bad as the headline sounds, but still some good food for thought (you could say this is another way of looking at stock vs. flow)
• Deekay’s Animator Creating Animation — charming, loved this

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• David Moldawer on getting your setup right — agreed, getting rid of friction is usually worth it (just make sure to avoid the trap of spending all your time working on your setup and not ever getting to the actual thing you wanted to make) (been there)
• Tania Rascia’s history of what she’s learned as a software developer — stellar example of both learning in public and blogging (and her React tutorial is well done, too)
• Jim Nielsen on Sass color functions in CSS — more verbose, sure, but I think worth it
• Tanya Basu on digital gardens — I think it’s a given at this point that I’ll link to anything that talks about digital gardens
• Matt Webb on Machine English — some fascinating history here, and it’s an interesting idea

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• The Handmade Network manifesto — I like this a lot (and would love to do more of this kind of coding)
• The Future of Coding weekly newsletter — fascinating posts and conversations, really digging this
• Ivan Reese’s Hest project — visual programming of sorts but with fascinating space/time travel aspects
• Logseq — an intriguing notebook system ala Roam (in the vein of digital gardens)
• Zig — still need more time to go through the overview here in depth, but I like what I’ve seen so far

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• Robin Sloan on stock and flow — a little old but still good, on creativity
• Niklaus Wirth on lean software (PDF) — even older but also a bounty of wisdom
• Salman Ansari on his digital garden — good points, particularly (for me) the bit about being interested in lots of different things
• Anne Laure Le-Cunff’s digital garden — also good, and I’m reminded I still need to build my own public notes system
• Tiffany Matthé on being okay with not being extraordinary — hear, hear (and what a relief it is)

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I’m going to try batching links into groups of five from now on, since solitary links often feel a little too insubstantial for a post. Links often won’t be related.

Links #1:

• Nadia Eghbal’s notes — rough, chronological, posted monthly, I’m intrigued by the format
• Tom Critchlow’s wiki — digital garden, topic-based, also intriguing
• Jared Pereira’s personal website chats — people talking about how they made their sites
• Katherine Ye’s notation repo — interesting thoughts on notation of various kinds
• Mozilla Hubs — small-scale social VR, pretty cool

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I recently came across Maggie Appleton’s article on digital gardens. Oh my goodness, this is delightful. I’m sure some small part of it is just nostalgia for the old days of the web, but the idea seems good and solid nonetheless. I love digital gardens. (See Mike Caulfield’s The Garden and the Stream and Swyx’s Digital Garden Terms of Service for more in this vein.)

Exploring some of these gardens led me to the idea of learning in public (also see Gift Egwuenu’s Learning in Public talk). Very closely related to digital gardens, of course, but a different angle to look at it from. It also nicely parallels the working in public idea I posted about recently.

I’m looking forward to adopting more of these practices myself. Not sure yet exactly what form that will take, but at the moment I’m thinking it’ll probably be the notes system I mentioned. While that would be doable with the website engine I have now, it wouldn’t be very ergonomic, so I’m probably going to retool. (And by probably I mean almost certainly, because I am an inveterate toolmaker at heart. I’ve written out plans for a new version of Slash, my blog engine, that will easily support notes as well as blog posts and web pages. More on that soon.)

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