Giles' blog

On the benefits of learning in public

While laid up with a minor but annoying medical issue over the last week, I've blogged more than usual. I've also spent some time reading through the archives here, and come to the conclusion that the best posts I've made -- at least from my perspective -- follow a similar pattern. They're posts where I've been learning how to do something, or how something worked, and presented what I've found as a summary, often as a tutorial.

I think of these as writing the post that I wished I'd found when I started learning whatever it was.

I think these posts serve two purposes.

Firstly, for me, they're an excellent way to codify and solidify the knowledge. Finding out how to do something new, and ideally doing it, is important to grow as an engineer, but writing down what you learned makes it sink into your mind at a gut level. I'm a big believer that you don't really understand something properly if you can't explain it to an intelligent and interested listener. I still remember how the epoll system call works, and the difference between edge-triggered and level-triggered events, despite it being almost twelve years since I wrote about it.

But it seems that they might also be the most useful ones for other people. From Google Search Console, I can see that the majority of visits to this blog from people who aren't regular readers comes from searches for things that I've written about in these posts. Comparing their search terms to what I wrote about in the posts in question, there seems to be a good match -- so hopefully they're finding what they are looking for.

I've decided to make a concerted effort to post more of this kind of thing. I struggled a bit to think of a snappy category name for them, as "tutorials that I wished someone else had written for me before I started trying to learn this stuff" is a bit wordy. I've tentatively settled on "TIL deep dives" -- they're not the quick "Today I learned" posts that I've seen on other people's blogs (Simon Willison is the master of this and even has a subdomain devoted to his) -- but they're a similar kind of beast, a longer form of the same kind of thing.

Thoughts, as always, welcome in the comments below.