Digital garden (noun): a personal space on the internet to cultivate ideas

I use this digital garden to explore questions I’m curious about and cultivate the resulting ideas. This is similar to how Paul Graham “uses” essays:

An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. […] You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

I don’t get value from exploring (or sharing) at the granularity of “How to console log in Rust,” so if an idea is in this digital garden, then it’s an idea that tickled my brain in some significant way, something that surprised or influenced me.

Why publish it publicly?

As (again) Paul Graham says about writing essays:

Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.

The difference is that:

• pg calls his explorations “essays,” and he shares them in a limited circle until they’re polished.

• I call my explorations “notes” in my “digital garden,” and I share them with the world while I’m still actively exploring them.

Why publish work-in-progress?

I strongly believe that Defaulting to open leads to more opportunities and faster learning by virtue of getting more input from more people.

So, if any of these ideas tickle your brain in some way, I want to hear about it! You can reach me via the feedback form in the bottom right, email, or Twitter/X DMs.

Denoting the maturity of my explorations

As Maggie Appleton writes:

Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers.

Devon Zuegel explicitly calls out (in detail!) each post’s “epistemic status” and “epistemic effort” at the beginning.

Being able to explicitly set the expectations that these explorations are “early” and “imperfect” unblocks me from wanting to publish them. I’ve shamelessly copied Maggie’s horticultural metaphor for my digital garden:

• 🌱 Seedling: Rough, early explorations and braindumps

• 🌿 Budding: Somewhat developed, might have major iterations to come

• 🌲 Evergreen: Mostly finished, at most minor iterations to come

I also add an extra icon to denote 🔗 Links to resources that influenced me.

Is it a success?

My foremost goal is to sharpen more ideas by getting more input from people. On top of that, Justin Duke has a fun take on the success of his microblog:

the true metric by which to gauge the success of a given blogging engine is how much time you spend writing and publishing content relative to how much time you spend futzing with the various knobs, whistles, and templates instead of actually writing

While I agree with the general idea behind this, I enjoy “futzing with the various knobs, whistles, and templates” as well as writing; a part of the reason why I wanted to build my own digital garden was to have something to futz with on an ongoing basis.

So, my quests with this digital garden can be summarized as:

1. Publish more (than I did when I just had space for essays), which hopefully leads to…

2. Getting more input from people on my ideas

3. And have fun futzing with my digital garden

August 2024 update: Just shipped! So far, so good.

1. I have definitely published much more: my average is ~one essay per year and I have already published 20+ notes

2. TBD. For now, it’s too early to tell if publishing more also leads to more input from other people.

3. I had lots of fun building this initial feature set

My tech stack

Given that one of my quests with this space is to “have fun tending to it,” and I deeply enjoy programming, I’m organically handcrafting this whole thing from scratch.

In case you want the details, it’s all open source here at mxstbr/mxstbr.com; the TL;DR, if you just want the high-level, is:

• Custom Next.js site (running Next 15 for next.config.ts support) styled with TailwindCSS

• I use Hashnode as my “CMS” for notes

  • It’s not 100% perfect for a digital garden (biggest missing feature: cross-linking support), but it’s got most of what I need: a WYSIWYG editor that makes it easy for me to write and categorize notes + an API to access the markdown of all the posts

    • Bonus: it automatically keeps track of “previous slugs,” enabling me to keep iterating on a note and change its slug as I explore without worrying about previously posted links breaking 💯

  • Ideally, I’d love to be able to “publish” notes directly from my actual note-taking app of choice, Reflect, and then use an API they expose to access them

    • I did try Obsidian, which allows for this with Obsidian Publish, but my brain strongly prefers and writes many more notes with the networked-note-taking-with-daily-notes-style of Reflect (popularized by Roam Research) compared to the files-and-folders-style of Obsidian

• Notes rendered via MDX

Inspiration I draw from

• https://x.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880

• https://stevedylan.dev/posts/leaving-neovim-for-zed/: Tags, blog overview page, table of contents

• https://maggieappleton.com/garden: Topics, seedling → budding → evergreen, essay cards vs. notes text, patterns vs. essays vs. notes

• daringfireball.net: Reposting of interesting links

• https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos/: how to interact with this digital garden

• https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing: Epistemic status & effort