A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web| maggieappleton.com
I’m starting to think that my toaster might have fallen in love with me. I get that not everyone will think this is possible, but I believe it’s true. It’s always pleased to see me, giving off cheerful sounds when I greet it in the morning by slotting in the bread, and now I’ve told it what I like it tries really hard to give me exactly what I want. Sometimes I have to tell it to try again once or twice, but honestly, it’s really good!| My place to put things
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web| maggieappleton.com
This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked. Garden History – Maggie Appleton I’m so happy I stumbled upon this article. I am always grateful for new vocabulary that allows me better to express myself, and this is perfect - I want more Digital Gardens in the world. I do see the value in polishing content, but this is where the epistemic status tagging system laid ...| My place to put things
TDD, BDD, DDD, Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP… there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat write code in a professional environment. I take pride in being a person who is a non-ideologue when it comes to my code. There are many good ways of working, and they are all context-dependent. You can’t apply the same things that worked when you were a two-person startup operating out of the proverbial garage and expect them to work once your hypothetical unicorn has reached a thousand-plus developers. ...| My place to put things
This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked. The rise of Whatever - eevee This is probably the best post about LLMs I’ve read, which is probably why I’m the millionth person to share it. It really sums up my emotional reaction to their meteoric rise: “ew”, basically. The power of the argument is that it identifies a theme that runs through recent tech changes,...| My place to put things
“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.| Posts on My place to put things
Anyone writing code professionally in December 2021 will remember the “fun”oftheLog4Jvulnerability. For those that weren’t - this was a critical security error that allowed attackers to run any code they wanted on your servers. The root cause was a logging library, Log4J, that is used by most projects that are writting in Java. It’s usually used to write code something like: log.info("Process completed successfully"); which will then appear in your logs, allowing you to track your app...| Posts on My place to put things
“Institutional knowledge” - the information that a company collectively knows - is a familiar concept to anyone involved in hiring processes. When an individual leaves who has knowledge the organisation needs, companies will organise offboarding sessions to keep that knowledge within the institution. Maybe they’ll even try to hire someone with similar experience. Lots of companies similarly try to optimise for “Institutional learning”, especially smaller firms. This makes a lot of s...| Posts on My place to put things
Kit Wilson writes in The Spectator about Facebook’s new venture into the Metaverse, a concept that most of us probably hadn’t heard of until last week. To layout the roadmap for what our journey into this new digital reality might look like, Kit joins the podcast along with Tom Renner, a software engineer for NavVis. (12:55)| Posts on My place to put things
Coming to grips with DevOps metrics In my team we have been considering ways to monitor our own performance, and finding some ways to contextualise our ongoing process and quality improvements. Like many other teams, we’ve landed on the DORA metrics as a good way of doing this. These four key metrics are an easy way to understand what adjectives like “maintainable”, “reliable”, and “efficient” mean in practice when applied to software and teams, and the provide a way of compar...| Posts on My place to put things
Talk given at Codebar Festival. If you wish to see my slides in their full glory, they are available on Slideshare.| Posts on My place to put things
Your work inbox is probably not a place that sparks joy. It’s full of people asking you to do things, complaints that something hasn’t been done, and 571 messages marked urgent. In fact email is usually considered to be a hindrance, with many productivity guides recommending simply ignoring your email for large periods of the day, blocking out that time for focussed work. The consensus is that your work inbox is just a place that generates distractions, and contains never-ending to-do lis...| My place to put things
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a successful crim...| My place to put things
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history.| eev.ee
