The benefits of learning in public

That's an excellent point! Every author needs to know they're not posting into a void.

100 upvotes, if I could. There is too little positive feedback in peoples' lives, if any. For this reason, I habitually cold email people who's stuff has moved me in some way (think, feel, pause etc...). Universe knows, I need it too :D So I put a "standing invitation" [1] front-and-center on my site, copying Derek Sivers and patio11. I get maybe a handful of "hello from an Internet stranger" emails, but every time it makes my day / week / longer if the conversation rambles on languidly. Email is so great for slow-mo thoughtful banter.

[1] https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation

A guy posted about how to fix a broken car socket (cigarette lighter or whatever you call them) on a 1999 Honda Civic. Apparently there's little... Transistors or something under the glove box. Never knew they were there. It was like a 50 cent fix. Would never have known if this person hadn't posted. I did drop him a note of thanks

I do this!

About two years ago I wanted to replay a game demo I remembered from an old (early 00') computer magazine demo disc. The actual game was nowhere to be found anywhere on the internet, but I did locate the developer and sent him an email.

Turns out the game was never actually released - its only public existence was as a demo game alongside a bunch of other games and software. He still had the installer for the game, which was small enough to fit as an attachment in the reply he gave.

He didn't say, but I got the distinct feeling that I might have made his day asking about that game he made more than 20 years ago.

The ~3 times this has ever happened to me, it made my week. Cannot recommend enough.

There was a blog I followed and really admired ten or fifteen years ago. One day I was reading one of his posts and in the middle of it was an exuberant note of thanks for an article I wrote doing a close read of Ruby's TSort package.

Super niche, mostly irrelevant to all but a vanishingly small number of people, and yet I had proof that someone I admired found it useful.

It's been years, and it still makes me smile when I think of it.

You never know what impact you might make on others.

Quite right. My late father used to do free audiobook recordings for LibriVox¹ and while I know he enjoyed their forums, after he died we discovered a little clutch of hand written letters from people who had enjoyed his recordings. It warms my heart to know how pleased that would have made him and was one of the brighter moments when clearing out the family home.

These signs of appreciation are, themselves, truly appreciated.

¹ https://librivox.org/ - if you'd like to hear him then try The Prisoner of Zenda: https://librivox.org/the-prisoner-of-zenda-by-anthony-hope/

Yes please! This sort of feedback keeps me going through the harder times. I could have sold out a million times if it wasn't for the feedback of grateful readers keeping me on the right path. A kind comment never fails to make my day!

I made it a habit of showing gratitude to content creators, as well as to open source maintainers.

The article says as much!

> Simon Willison is the master of this and even has a subdomain devoted to his

Two days ago, I was looking on how to get Gamescope working with a new computer on NixOS. I searched around, and found a Reddit post about it [1], found that they had a Github Gist attached to it, and then realized that I was the guy who posted it. I had completely forgot that I had done this work already.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dahr3g/steamos_base...

My most useful stack overflow answer is one where I barely knew what I was doing (something back in MVC.net) and while I managed to fix the problem, which was the same as the one asked about, I didn’t understand any of the marked “best answers” or how they were relevant, so i wrote out how I’d fixed it in “I clicked here and typed this to match that” terms. Much later I knew enough to realize that of course my answer was exactly what those other answers were saying to do, but mine still got buckets of votes from all the other poor folk googling without having yet understood the bindings and views and magic connections between pieces that Visual Studio was making.

That's what I do too. The last post I did was trying to figure out how to replace the battery in my baby monitor.

https://www.michael1e.com/how-to-replace-the-eufy-spaceview-...

I also do this.

Still don’t know how to respond when i get fucked by LLM authoritarians (Grok, ChatGPT, etc.).

They don’t give the traffic back / incentives or even cite us as the source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same with posting questions - try to include all the things you searched for, so when it gets answered, the next person can find it.

That's a great habit! Not only does it help solidify what you've learned, but it also makes life easier for the next person facing the same issue

Something I wish I had done more. You think you don't need to make a note because it's fresh in your head at the time, but years later, even the context is gone. Expecting to remember arcane solutions to things you do rarely is unrealistic. I've gotten better but still have a ways to go. One thing that removes the barrier is to just have common log to put everything, perhaps with some tags, so you can quickly open it and type your thoughts when they're fresh, without having to worry about packaging it just right.

Also, the act of writing it down helps you to fix things in memory.

But I've searched for things and found my own old blog posts on occasion.

Good point! I can never remember the steps to install the Ubiquiti management app on Arch after repaving my workstation (which I do ever other year or so). But I blogged about it in 2019, so I use that as a reminder.

TBH I think there's value in posting even if AIs are going to steal it -- I did a follow-up post trying to express why that is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43166761

Agreed. A typical post on my blog gets no comments. The mean is probably one because the posts that do get comments normally get three or four. The biggest dopamine hit I've had in 19 years of blogging was seeing this post hit #1 on the HN front page... and I doubt I'll see that happen again.

> Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way

Could I ask for a link?

Well done. Great you've got time for that. Thanks.

I think this is good use for microblogging platforms like Mastodon and the others, to which you can link to from within your blog. If you've written a lot of mini-posts[1] that fit a theme you can edit them together into larger blog post eventually. If you have complete control over your website you could even feature some of your most recent or popular mini-posts on your front page.

[1] I don't know what the best term is to describe theses kinds of posts that distinguishes them from long form blog posts. What do people do on Mastodon--toot? I'm just going with mini-post for now.