I stumbled upon the Digital Garden concept on HN recently when the Joel Hooks “My blog is a digital garden, not a blog” post ranked in the home page.
That’s how I got in touch with the term and the idea.
This website is many things: it’s a collection of tutorials, it’s the place where you can get my free books, it’s the thing I curate every day.
Having an analog garden too, in other words a garden in the real world, it’s the same - you need to take care of it constantly if you want it to be beautiful and nice.
I call my site a blog, but this just refers to the reverse chronological order of the homepage list of posts.
Otherwise it’s more like my personal publishing platform, but the name is boring. Digital Garden sounds cooler.
It’s not a traditional blog. For example, all blogs have comments. I don’t have comments, I never had them. I want to remove all the friction in publishing and I do not have the bandwidth to moderate and engage in discussions related to my blog posts.
My blog posts are not peer-reviewed, and many times I publish a 100 words blog post and I do not care if all the other blogs in my niche, call them competitors if you want, publish 5.000 words minimum. I don’t care.
Sometimes I write things like this post, just reflections, work in progress thoughts.
I also don’t do boring keyword research to find posts that might be popular, I just write what I want to write.
I have a home page with all my latest posts in reverse chronological order, but I think it’s useless. We have RSS readers for that. Sure, having maybe 7 or 10 latest posts is cool, but 300 like I do now? I don’t know.
Most of the things I publish here are how-to instructions on how I solved a bug, or how I implemented a particular feature, or the notes on the things I learned.
I also want to start a new series where I’ll talk about everything related to a new software product business I’m about to start in the coming months called Prototyped.
I don’t have another good term for my website. “Website”, sure, is a term. But a boring one. Publication? Even more boring. And I’m not Wired or freeCodeCamp, it’s just me.
This is my Digital Garden, the place where I grow all the things I’m interested in, I talk about what I’m interested in, and where I grow myself.
More lab tutorials:
- The stack I use to run this blog
- 8 good reasons to become a software developer
- SEO for developers writing blogs
- Review of the book The 4-Hour Work Week
- Build a lifestyle business
- Build your own platform
- As an indie maker, what kind of product should you build?
- Create your own job security
- Developers, learn marketing
- The freedom of a product business
- Generating value
- Have a purpose for your business
- The idea is nothing
- The niche
- Remote working for software developers
- Product / market fit
- The best podcasts for frontend developers
- Why should I create an email list?
- Disconnect time from money
- The scarcity principle applied to software products
- The social proof principle
- How I added Dark Mode to my website
- My notes on the Deep Work book
- The pros of using a boring stack
- How to estimate programming time
- On going independent as a developer
- How to learn how to learn
- Why interview questions for programming jobs are so difficult?
- Do I need a degree to be a programmer?
- Everyone can learn programming
- How to be productive
- How to get the real number of pageviews of a static site
- Have you filled a developer bucket today?
- How I record my videos
- All the software projects I made in the past
- Tutorial purgatory from the perspective of a tutorial maker
- Every developer should have a blog. Hereβs why, and how to stick with it
- Having a business mindset for developers
- How to write Unmaintainable Code
- What is Imposter Syndrome
- How to work from home without going crazy
- How I stopped worrying and learned to love the JavaScript ecosystem
- How I prototype a Web Page
- You should be the worst developer in your team
- How to start a blog using Hugo
- Write what you don't know
- How to block distractions using uBlock Origin
- Coding is an art
- I wrote 1 blog post every day for 2 years. Here's 5 things I learned about SEO
- Dealing with the fire
- On being a generalist
- The Developerβs Dilemma
- My plan for being hired as a Go developer. In 2017
- Productivity gains of using a Mac and an iOS device
- How to go from tutorials to your own project
- This is my little Digital Garden
- How to start freelancing as a developer
- Sharing the Journey Towards Building a Software Product Business
- Subfolder vs subdomain
- How I use text expanding to save time
- Software is a superpower
- I love books