On TIL repositories

Thanks to a recent blog post by Simon Willison I stumbled upon TIL repositories, which are basically collections of short tips and tricks people have learnt. Simon now has his own TIL repo on https://github.com/simonw/til and looking through public repos on GitHub I’ve found dozens and dozens of others. Looks like this has been going on for many years and I’ve simply not noticed it 😔

Anyway, I immediately thought about setting something like that up for myself but then a thought came: Don’t I already have a platform for post tips and tricks in short form markdown? Yes! You’re actually looking at it right now. In fact, I’ve already blogged TILs very infrequently over the last couple of years. Josh Branchaud defines the content for his TIL repository as “These are things that don’t really warrant a full blog post.” but I simply don’t want to make this distinction. A thing-I’ve-learnt and even if it’s just 5 lines + some code is still worth a blog post for me.

So, instead of setting up yet another repository and website, I’m just going to post all these little tidbits here and tag them appropriately. This means that I don’t have to set up any kind of additional automation for generating an RSS feed as I already have that and with any luck you should see some TIL-type content appearing here more frequently in the future!

And as for that nice listing of all tips on a single page some folks have: I think I will simply write a special listing page for the “til” tag in the next couple of days…