I write short, timely write-ups on things I learn, to promote “learning in public”.
Recent TILs (all)
- Enable nginx debug logs on an IP
- Follow changes in a file on Github
- Search and parse a field with Awk
You can browse all my TILs, and there’s a feed of my TILs for your feedreader.
What is a TIL?
One way I “learn in public” is by posting short write-ups on things I learn. I try to post them relatively soon after I learn the thing. I try to include enough detail that they’re useful to other people.
TILs do not represent the full depth of my thinking on a topic. They are not nuanced deep-dives, explaining potential tradeoffs about every possible situation. They haven’t passed heavy technical or editorial review.
Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results. DO NOT EAT. The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage. All information in this site is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information.
Why “TIL”, though?
I was inspired by Simon Willison. Originally, TIL was short for “today, I learned”. However, “things I’ve learned” is probably a better backronym.
Nifty. How’d you do this?
Right now, these are WordPress posts. I rigged up a little bit of code and styling to add some features, like:
- there is a list of TIL posts per tag
- each group of TIL posts, like the chronological and tag-based groups, has an index at the top
- each TIL post in a group has a “Back to Index” link
- the tag list on each TIL post links to the TIL tag group, not the site-wide tag group
There are things I want to add, like a little TIL explanation/disclaimer to the lists of posts and to the individual posts.
A blocker to public release, however, is figuring out how I want to handle pagination on the big TIL lists. Let me know if you have any thoughts!