Til Alternatives

til reviews and mentions

• How and why to make a /now page on your site
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 May 2024

  This is a cool idea. I also really like simonw’s TIL feed:

  https://til.simonwillison.net/

  Like a microblog of little learnings in day-to-day development.

  One interesting thing that occurred to me recently is that my personal site (https://amontalenti.com) is more an essay archive and identity verification tool, than it is a “blog” or “microblog.” That is, the timestamps of the content on there are the least interesting thing about it.

  As for something like /now, the most fascinating implementation of this is an old friend of mine from college. He and I were both early 2000s bloggers, ut he came up with the idea, in 2001 or so, to keep a nearly-daily one sentence personal diary on his blog. He kept that up for the last 20 years (he is nowadays a CS researcher and inventor in HCI). Very impressive near-daily microblogging habit over a lifetime!

  https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Home/Log

• Duty to Document
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024

  > If you learn something the hard way, share your findings with others. You have blazed a new trail; now you must mark it for your fellow travellers. Sharing knowledge is an unreasonably effective way of helping others.

  This is a really nice philosophy. It's one of the reasons why I have my https://til.simonwillison.net TIL site - any time I search for something and can't find the answer is a hint that there's a tiny gap in the internet which I can help fill.

• Collection of "Today I Learned" notes
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Nov 2023

  Hosting these on GitHub is such a good idea:

  - GitHub have world class backups - commit something there and it gets replicated to data centers on three continents (I believe) - and a free public repo there won't vanish if you forget to update an expired credit card

  - Related: GitHub is free. I care about this not because of not wanting to pay now, but because I don't want my content to be at risk if I forget to pay in the future (or can't pay for whatever reason)

  - GitHub has several great web UIs for editing content, in addition to being able to edit in any other tool that supports the git protocol

  - GitHub Actions makes it possible to add all sorts of automations on top of your notes, again for free. I use that to deploy my custom https://til.simonwillison.net site (mainly to give myself search)

  - GitHub's own search is pretty good though!

  - You can also use GitHub Pages if you just want a custom static site version of your notes.

  - if someone spots a typo in your notes they can submit a PR to fix it!

• Building a Blog in Django
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023

  That's awesome. Parts of that sound a little bit like how my https://til.simonwillison.net/ site works.

• Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023

  I started publishing "TIL" posts a few years ago and everything in this post here resonated 100% with my experience of writing those.

  The great thing about TILs is that once you form a solid set of habits around them they can be extremely quick to put together: the majority of my TIL posts take between 15 minutes and half an hour to write.

  I make extensive personal notes on everything I'm doing (in GitHub issues threads or VS Code scratch documents) - turning those into a TIL is mainly about pasting those notes into a Markdown file and tidying them up a bit.

  https://til.simonwillison.net/ is my collection so far.

  I get a huge amount of value out of these. I don't particularly care if other people read them, the value is in helping me better understand the material and enabling me to refer back to them in the future.

  I refer to some of them multiple times every week! This one for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject

• Stopping at 90%
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Aug 2023

  I've started to consider "commit to writing about it" as the price I have to pay for giving into the lure of another project. It's one of the main reasons I publish so much content on https://simonwillison.net/ and https://til.simonwillison.net

  A project with a published write-up unlocks so much more value than one which you complete without giving others a chance of understanding what you built.

  I've maintained internal blogs (sometimes just a Slack channel or Confluence area) at previous employers for this purpose too.

• Show HN: ChatLLaMA – A ChatGPT style chatbot for Facebook's LLaMA
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Mar 2023

  https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/main/llms/llama-7b-m2.md

• Datasette is my data hammer
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2023

  I'm definitely keen on suggestions for improvements I can make to the default UI.

  Datasette provides both a JSON API (easily enabled for CORS access) and supports custom templates, so it's possible to customize the UI any way you like.

  So far I've not seen many examples of extensive customization. I use the custom templates a lot myself - these four sites are all just regular Datasette with some custom templates:

  - https://datasette.io/

  - https://til.simonwillison.net/

  - https://www.niche-museums.com/

  - https://www.rockybeaches.com/us/pillar-point

  Source code is on GitHub for all four.

• Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Oct 2022

  I have trouble answering this question myself, and I created it!

  The problem I have is that it can be applied to too many different problems.

  I personally have used it for the following (a truncated summary):

  - Publishing data online to allow other people to explore it, for example https://scotrail.datasette.io and https://russian-ira-facebook-ads.datasettes.com/

  - Building websites, by combining it with custom templates. https://datasette.io and https://www.niche-museums.com and https://til.simonwillison.net are three examples

  - Building my own combined search engine over a bunch of different data. https://github-to-sqlite.dogsheep.net is this for my GitHub issues and commits and issue comments across 100+ projects

  - Similarly, building a code search engine across multiple repos (partly to demonstrate how far you can go with custom plugins): https://ripgrep.datasette.io

  - Any time I have a CSV file I open it in the Datasette Desktop macOS app first to start exploring it: https://datasette.io/desktop

  - As a prototyping tool. It's the fastest way I know of to get from some data files (CSV or JSON) to a working JSON API - and a GraphQL API too using this plugin: https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-graphql

  - Messing around with geospatial data - here's a write-up of my favourite experiment with that so far: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jan/24/drawing-shapes-spatial...

  This is a bewilderingly wide array of things! And I keep on finding new problems I can apply it to:

  Of course, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But thanks to the plugin system (and the amazing flexibility of SQLite under the good) I can reshape my hammer into all sorts of interesting shapes!

  I've been trying to capture some of this at https://datasette.io/for

  This is one of my biggest marketing challenges for the project though. If someone asks you for an elevator pitch you need to do better than spending 15 minutes talking through a wide ranging bulleted list!

• Simon Willison's cool categorised TIL page
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2022
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