Today I Learned

This isn't just a post linking to my TIL page, but it's more moving things to where they need to go. Sometimes I try to cram everything into one place because it seems more tidy that way, but that breaks down over time, and either you are left with a mess, or a super clean area because you never end up using it.

So instead of trying to cram everything into once place I'm working on breaking things out to places they SHOULD be going; for example:

• Code snippets that I re-use should go into a snippet manager; I use ultisnips
• Daily updates and logs should go in either my paper journal or digital journal. I use dynalist.io for my work journal so I can tag and search on things that happen which comes in really handy when you don't remember why you did something a few months ago.
• Technical stuff I want to remember goes in TIL
• Studies and dissections go into the physical sketchbook.
• Projects that I've finished go on the blog.
• dynalist.io has my inbox of things I want to investigate further.
• dynalist.io also has my notes of all the things I'm working on, which will later be revised into something more permanent like a blog post or TIL.
• Recipes goes into Paprika
• Projects with code go into Github

The important thing here is taking what you learn and create everyday and converting it into something usable; either a tool or an easy to find document somewhere; what I don't want to do is just collect, horde, and just end up with a bunch of useless stacks of unusable stuff.

A better way to search

This got me thinking of a better way to search for information. Instead of heading straight to google to search for the answer to your question, first I write my question down in my drafts section in dynalist.io. Then I go and do whatever research I need for the question at hand, updating the draft entry as I go. Once I finish doing whatever I was trying to figure out, I now have a draft entry that I can convert over to something that I can use in the future like a TIL entry, or a snippet that I can use again.

Searching TIL quickly

Speaking of ways of searching better, if you clone my TIL repo, you can use something like this:

alias til='find /path_to_til_repo/til -name "*.md" -exec printf "{}:" \; -exec head -n 1 {} \;  | fzf -d ":" --with-nth 2 | cat $(awk -F: {"print \$1"})'

to quickly search the title of each entry and print out the one you select via fzf.

The need for more TILs on the internet

The more I use the internet, the more I find the need for more people to share what they know via some sort of TIL format. Wading through the SEO crap to find basic information is getting harder and harder; searching through 20 pages of fluff material just to find the one piece of information the title of the article claims to have.

I should really look into publishing these TILs in a Gemini format.