Why these articles?

During my university years, I often tried to blog about the ideas. Unfortnately, still until today, I did not find the best way to put my ideas on paper.

My first try was with Medium. At the start Medium is an easy way to share ideas with an audience, however, I noticed that my focus shifted from understanding ideas to chasing an audience. Currently I also experience that content on Medium is more focused on writing for engagement rather than learning. After trying Medium, I lost motivation and set goals (such as reaching a follower count) that did not align with my real goal: synthesize ideas and provide value in understanding knowlegde.

During my first job, I started to create a second brain. A second brain for me is a personal knowledge management system for storing and organizing notes. I often refer back to notes I put in my second brain. I still find it very useful. I was inspired by Joshua Morony ¹ approach of markdown files. This is a great system to develop a second brain as a developer. Reflecting now on it, I was missing the interaction with the information. For example, I would copy a note from a random internet web page, however after putting it in the second brain don’t do anything with it: no refutation, not trying to find new connections or perform any follow up questions.

At this moment of writing, I found a new system I am very keen on: A digital garden. A digital garden is a personal, evolving collection of ideas published openly. It is not a polished blog. It is more a blog in progress, in which ideas are explored now and then. Just like watering the plants and planting flowers, every now and then I come back to further improve an existing article or to start writing new ideas down. The blog of Joel Hooks² introduced me to the concept. This digital garden also embraces a second principle: Show your work.

Show your work

I work with the garage door up. This is a phrase popularized by Andy Matuschak³ to describe sharing work publicly as it happens, rather than waiting until it’s polished. This means after each time I work on this website, I publish my writings. Unfinished Ideas are out in the open. This way I hope people reach out to discuss the topic I am talking about. It also lowers the bar: work does not need to perfect and does not need to be finished. It only needs to be put on paper. Once started, everyone can follow my progress on writing the article.

Here on the website, you will find notes on productivity, self-development, and ideas from books I read. Some will be “finished” (read: readable), but most likely not.

References

Footnotes

1. Joshua Morony explains in this youtube video the approach that suits my second brain well. ↩

2. This website introduced me to the concept of a digital garden. ↩

3. Popularized by Andy Matuschak, orginal idea from Robin Sloan. ↩